I had many things to thank God for at the end of that day.
—KEN REDDY, APRIL 18, 1942, DIARY ENTRY
THE RUSSIANS WOKE YORK and his crew on April 19 at around 9:30 a.m., informing them that breakfast would be served in half an hour. The fliers sat down soon afterward with the colonel and his staff in the same downstairs room they had been in the night before, asking right away about obtaining gasoline to fly on to China.
“Business must never be discussed over meat and wine,” the colonel said. “All decisions will be made in due time. First you must eat and drink heartily.”
Caviar, cheeses, pickled fish, and black bread crowded the table along with other delicacies. The first course consisted of a cream soup followed by roast goose and fried potatoes. The fliers next feasted on a roast pig, which was served whole to allow the men to slice off individual portions. A hot chocolate drink rounded out the five-hour meal. “During this time, we had toasted the Red Army; they had toasted the US Army. We had toasted the Red Navy; they had toasted the US Navy. We had toasted the Russian Air Force; they had toasted the US Army Air Corps,” Emmens recalled. “We toasted victory to the free people of the world about three times.”
“Tell you what,” York finally said to the colonel. “How’d you like to see the inside of our ship?”
The Russian eagerly accepted the offer. York even offered, despite the vodka, to give the colonel a flight, which he smartly refused. The Russians explored the bomber, enjoying a laugh over the broomstick tail guns.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a little ride?” York asked the colonel as he fired up the B-25’s twin engines. The terrified colonel almost knocked Emmens over as he rushed to climb out of the bomber.
The fliers returned to their rooms about 3:45 p.m., no closer to the goal of securing gasoline and flying to China. The inebriated airmen stretched out, only to be awakened by the interpreter forty-five minutes later.
“You must hurry and get up,” he demanded. “You are leaving at once. The airplane is waiting!”
“My God, I have never flown in this condition, but so be it,” Emmens thought. “If they have gassed our airplane, let’s get the hell out of here and get on it.”
Emmens could at least get out of bed. “I finally had to pull York up to a sitting position,” he recalled. “We were in bad shape, easy to handle.”
The Russians ushered the fliers onto an aged bus and drove them out to a waiting DC-3, which the locals dubbed the “Roosky Dooglas.”
“Where are we going,” one the fliers asked, “and what about our bags?”
“You will learn everything in due time.”
The DC-3 roared into the afternoon sky and the airmen soon fell back asleep, a journey interrupted only by the occasional trip to the rear of the plane that left Emmens paler each time. The airmen deduced that the plane flew in a northerly direction, but could discern little else over the two-and-a-half-hour trip.
“Khabarovsk,” the colonel announced as the plane circled an airport at nightfall in preparation for landing.
A large industrial city in eastern Siberia, Khabarovsk sat along the Amur River just north of Manchuria. The raiders disembarked and climbed into several waiting cars, which drove them to a nearby building. The Russians led them inside and to an office occupied by a Russian officer, who stood behind a large desk.
“May I introduce to you General Stern commanding general of the Far Eastern Red Army, who wishes to ask you a few questions,” the interpreter said.
Stern’s physical stature wowed Emmens, who counted at least four stars on his shirt’s collar. “General Stern was the nearest to a human ape I think I have ever seen,” Emmens recalled. “His shoulders must have been three feet across, narrow hips, and his arms hung almost to his knees, practically no neck. I remember just being amazed at his totally bald head. There wasn’t a hair on it anywhere.”
The general interrogated the fliers about the raid, about targets, the route across Japan, and whether any enemy planes had followed them, a question he repeated several times. The airmen answered candidly but refused to reveal the role of the Hornet. The general concluded the half-hour interview with a lengthy statement, which the interpreter translated. “The General has asked me to tell you that according to a decision reached between our two governments and by direction of orders from Moscow, you will be interned in the Soviet Union until such a time as further decisions are made in your case,” the interpreter said. “You will commence your internment immediately in quarters which have been prepared for you outside the city of Khabarovsk. You will be given proper protection and attempts will be made to make you comfortable.”
The Russians loaded the raiders back into the cars and drove them along narrow and unpaved streets. The car’s single headlight illuminated men and women dressed in rags. Factories stood behind tall fences, often overseen by guards atop watchtowers.
After about an hour the cars rolled up outside a one-acre fenced property that the fliers would later learn the Russians called a dacha, a country house often used for Red Army officers on rest. The primitive property had enough bedrooms for the raiders and guards as well as a kitchen, dining room, and odiferous toilet.
“Well, here we are,” York said.
The disheartened fliers had awakened that morning expecting to obtain gasoline and fly on to China. Now they faced an uncertain future. Would the internment last a week or a year—or worse, the war? No one knew, though the airmen definitely doubted the general’s claim that this was a joint arrangement, decided by both the American and the Russian governments. “There wasn’t anything to do but sit down,” Emmens later wrote. “We had no baggage with us, no unpacking to do.”
A Russian officer appeared at the door, introducing himself as Mihaiel Constantinovich Schmaring, a name the raiders would soon shorten simply to Mike. “I speak a little English,” he said. “I will be staying with you.”
Mike invited the raiders to enjoy a late dinner of black bread, salmon caviar, and cheese followed by soup, meat, and potatoes and, of course, vodka. Around midnight the news came over the radio, which Mike translated for the information-starved internees. The broadcast’s final report claimed that Japan had shot down eleven bombers in the recent raid on Tokyo. The airmen had no way to know whether the report was true or just enemy propaganda, but the possibility floored the raiders. “My God, there had been only sixteen airplanes on the whole raid, and if eleven had been shot down over Japan we were one of five surviving aircraft!” Emmens later wrote. “I can tell you we felt pretty sad that night as we turned in—our first night as internees in the Soviet Union.”
The men spent the next day exploring the dacha, which included an unkempt yard that sloped down toward the Amur River, whose dark waters were all that separated the airmen from Japanese-controlled Manchuria. News reports revised down the number of bombers lost over Tokyo, from eleven to seven, prompting the raiders to conclude all such reports were likely propaganda. The airmen’s bags arrived several days later, though the raiders discovered the Russians had searched them and pilfered all candy and American cigarettes. “Anything that resembled airplane equipment was kept by them,” York would later tell American investigators, “including our pistols.”
Despite a trip to a primitive bathhouse, as well as lessons on the various types and potencies of vodka, the raiders soon grew restless. “Every day had been almost exactly the same,” Emmens wrote. “We got up at about nine-thirty, had breakfast at ten, lunch at one, supper at seven, and rounded up each day with the news and tea at midnight. The drinks of vodka were beginning to be looked forward to as a relief from boredom, but the gaps of time in between were pretty hard to fill up. We slept quite a bit, whittled wood, and attempted now and then to get a start on the language.”
A car pulled up one night at the dacha after the raiders had spent some ten days in Khabarovsk. Two Russian officers who had left earlier that day returned, summoning Mike from the dinner table. He came back moments later, sat down, and finished his dinner before he announced that the raiders were leaving.
“Leaving!” the raiders replied. “When?”
“You must be ready tonight.”
“Where are we going?” the raiders pressed.
“You will find out,” Mike replied. “Everything in due time.”
AN INFLUX OF VISITORS at dawn aroused Don Smith and the crew of the TNT. The locals appeared to show particular deference to one man, who was better dressed than the others, though much of his nose was eaten away by what Doc White suspected was leprosy. He looked over the battered fliers and then left. The host told the aviators via sign language that he departed in a boat, which the fliers feared meant he planned to betray them to the Japanese. The men scarfed down a breakfast of rice, dried shrimp, and garlic greens, pulled on their wet clothes, and left. The first person the fliers met was a fisherman with bombardier Howard Sessler in tow. “He was still intact, though chilly, having spent the night in a sheltered cleft in the rocks, about two miles from where we landed,” White wrote in his diary. “A native explained that because of a Jap gunboat in local waters we should have to wait till dark to go. Nothing for it but to go back and keep under cover.”
The raiders returned to the hut to find that the leader had come back with the news that the Japanese were near. The aviators had no choice but to remain in the hut that day, napping and drying their clothes. Five men arrived at dusk and escorted the fliers down to a small junk in a cove. The airmen crawled into the boat, where the Chinese had them lie on the bottom and covered them with mats before sculling out to sea. No wind and a cold drizzle made the passage slow. “Several times other boats passed nearby and we always kept very quiet until they were out of earshot. Once we heard motors and saw a searchlight in the distance,” White wrote. “We got awfully cramped and uncomfortable lying still in the bilge of the little junk so the fishermen gave us some rude raincoats made of tree bark to cover our clothes in case we should be seen. We could then sit up and look around, though there wasn’t much to see in the dark and drizzle.”
The boat reached the island of Nandien—where Lawson’s Ruptured Duck had crashed—around midnight, and the crew tied up at a small stone pier. The fliers remained in the boat except for White, who set off down the pier with two of the Chinese men and a couple of lanterns. The trio hiked for over an hour along narrow footpaths that snaked between rice paddies, over steep hills, and through crevices. There was no wind, but a heavy mist hung in the air; the sole relief from the darkness came from the two lantern candles. “The only sound was the croaking of innumerable frogs and the scrape of our feet,” White later wrote. “The utter alien-ness of the surroundings made it seem as though I were taking a stroll on another planet.”
After an hour the group reached a farmhouse, where White met guerrilla leader Jai Foo Chang, whom Lawson had referred to simply as Charlie. He informed White that another B-25 crew had crashed on the island and that he had helped the men escape. Charlie produced a few mementos from the crew, including a card with Davenport’s name. White knew immediately that the crew was Lawson’s. Charlie informed him that most of the crew was injured, mimicking broken teeth, arms, and legs and injured eyes. White wanted to know how quickly the airmen could follow, but Charlie told him the men would have to wait. White sent a note back to the boat with one of Charlie’s men, telling the others to come to the farmhouse. White then sat up for a couple of hours, drinking tea and chatting. Charlie was disappointed to learn that the men had been unable to salvage any guns from the plane. He likewise was pained to hear about the fall of Singapore.
“Damn and fuck,” he said.
The others arrived, and the fliers set off to a nearby farmhouse, where the locals provided them mats to stretch out on atop the dirt floor. Charlie appeared soon after daybreak with several chickens. The presence of a Japanese garrison on the island forced the men to spend the day hiding out. White passed out coins and pictures of his kids. Sanitation he noted was nonexistent, though it didn’t stop the airmen from feasting on the chickens. The plan was to travel that night, and Charlie detailed five men to guard the fliers. Word arrived late that afternoon that the Japanese were coming, so the aircrew split up into small groups and set off, hiking through the lush hills.
The various groups reassembled on the banks of a canal, bidding Charlie farewell before climbing into a flat-bottomed skiff. Villagers would run out and shout information, part of what the airmen dubbed the grapevine telegraph. At other times locals would offer up hard-boiled eggs. The journey down the canal fascinated White, who described the primitive scene in his diary. “I noticed the extreme age of everything we saw,” he wrote. “Carving on the ridgepoles of tiled roofs; others thatched; sluice gates of carved stone; extensive canals and terraces. Everything was just as it had been for thousands of years except for us and the guns of our companions.”
The boat reached the end of the canal around dusk. The aviators disembarked and walked about a mile to a local barracks, where they ate eggs, rice, and shrimp and drank tea and wine before pushing on another couple miles in the dark, arriving at an abandoned house. The group waited until the moon set, then climbed aboard another small boat for a short trip before continuing on foot to an old temple. A local priest greeted them. “The old priest had fine features, wild hair and beard, and wore a black gown,” White wrote. “Our leader and the priest offered up prayers for us and then tested the omens via the jumping sticks three times. Once for them, once for us, and once for Chiang Kai-shek!”
The men had a late dinner of eggs and tea and then shivered as they tried to sleep on mats on the floor without any blankets. The next day the fliers remained hidden in the temple. White shared chocolate and crackers with the priest; in exchange he offered hard black Chinese candy. Around 3 p.m. one of the scouts arrived with the news that sixty-five Japanese soldiers were en route to the temple.
The fliers gathered up their few belongings, and the Chinese hustled them down the trail to a nearby farmhouse. After much debate the owner escorted them inside and through a secret panel hidden behind a bed that led into a cave dug out of the hillside. The airmen sat on a platform built against the far wall, which the Chinese covered with mats. A single candle placed in a wall niche provided the only light. The men heard scuffling outside before half a dozen Chinese entered, sitting between the fliers and the door, guns cocked and ready to fire. “We felt trapped like rats,” White wrote in his diary. “I had some of the worst moments of my life while we waited for the Japs to find us.”
The Chinese men waited and smoked, fogging the cave and threatening to choke the airmen. The fliers heard the Japanese soldiers arrive outside, splitting up to search for the airmen. “Several times we heard the questing footsteps cross the roof of our hiding-place and then we heard them enter the house which hid the entrance to the cave,” White wrote. “From there presently arose sounds of struggle and screams and shouts. One of our escorts turned to us and made whipping motions across another’s back. The Japs were beating the owner of the house trying to make him tell where we were.”
Edward Saylor studied one of the guerrillas closest to him, who he noted had a dated and rusty rifle and cloth ammunition belt, filled with various rounds of all shapes and sizes, ammo Saylor surmised he had scrounged. “I don’t know whether he could have helped us or not,” Saylor recalled. “He was there to try.” The cigarette smoke became unbearable as the men waited. “The air in the cave, none too fresh to start with, became suffocating,” White wrote. “It was all we could do to keep from coughing and thus betraying our position.” The men heard a sudden confrontation. “Clattering noises outside, then many men talking, sounds of blows, screams,” one report noted. “The Japanese had come—they beat the old man, they beat the villagers, but nobody squealed.”
Finally after two hours the Japanese left. “Everyone relaxed and crawled out,” White wrote in his diary. “I was never so glad to see the light of day.” The priest met the men and through sign language told of the ordeal he had suffered. “They had evidently entered his temple, defaced his idols and had even beaten him, but he showed us how he had cried, torn his hair and wrung his hands and had sworn that he had never seen us,” White wrote. “Any of these poor people could have made a very nice bit of change by betraying us to the Japanese, but the thought apparently never entered their minds. Their sense of responsibility for us and their hatred of the Jap were enough.”
The fliers trudged on that afternoon and into the night, winding along narrow trails and around rice paddies. At a house near the water the men ate chicken, rice, shrimp, and eggs before climbing aboard a junk bound for the mainland. The clear night and breeze offered a chance for the men to relax and watch how the Chinese handled the boat. It turned out the Japanese occupied the intended destination, forcing the men to divert around 4 a.m. to a sleepy village. They stopped off at a home above a dry goods store for breakfast and an opportunity to wash with soap before continuing on foot throughout the day. “Fascinating countryside,” White noted in his diary. “Our feet were sore and blistered, the soles of our shoes cracked from drying them out over a fire.”
The men finally boarded two small junks for ferryboats and headed several miles upriver before disembarking and walking another five miles. The magistrate gave the crew a royal welcome, and the men learned that Lawson’s crew had passed through two days earlier. The fliers afterward visited the local army headquarters, where the Chinese gave them soap for bathing and clean civilian shirts and shorts. “Glad to get off my lousy underwear!” White wrote in his diary. “Had a very nice dinner and entertainment. Small girls brought us flowers, danced, and sang about the wonders of flight.” The Chinese asked whether the fliers needed the service of women. “We replied that we appreciated the offer,” White wrote, “but were just too tired!”
The airmen awoke the next morning refreshed for the first time in days. “Had a gorgeous night’s sleep and then breakfast,” White wrote in his diary. “Washed our teeth for the first time since leaving the ship.” The Chinese offered to let the airmen send telegrams. White sent one to his wife, Edith, that read simply, “Safe and well,” but she would never receive it. The Chinese then hosted a reception that morning in honor of the fliers attended by town officials, schoolchildren, and soldiers. The fliers looked past the out-of-tune bugle and enjoyed the cheers and singing. The magistrate and others made speeches followed by short remarks from each of the airmen. Officials presented the airmen with a silk banner. A photographer who had traveled some thirty-five miles on foot documented the event with a 12 x 12 camera, one with no shutter or diaphragm. White reciprocated and gave the magistrate’s son his helmet.
The fliers set out that morning to find Lawson and his crew, walking through town in what White described in his diary as “a triumphal procession—soldiers, firecrackers, confetti, cheers and songs.” Outside town the aviators climbed into wicker sedan chairs for the long trip to the hospital in Linghai, escorted by ten soldiers. “We went up a long valley,” White wrote in his diary. “The broad stone-paved road degenerated to a single muddy track at times. Rice paddies everywhere, right up the hillsides. Pumps and bailers; scattered farming settlements; hay drying in trees. The age of everything and lack of repair noticeable.”
The procession passed through a small village where schoolchildren and teachers greeted the fliers, holding up banners, cheering, and singing songs about airplanes. The fliers passed down the village’s main street, lined with shops, mostly selling food. The aviators ate eggs, pork, and sausages for lunch, then continued on up into the mountains, a trail of children following behind. “Everywhere we went people crowded around to see us,” White wrote in his diary. “One baby crawled under my chair. Its mother yanked it out and slapped it, and it started to cry. I gave it a penny and it stopped instantly.”
The men stopped that night at an army outpost, then pressed on the next morning to Linghai, arriving around 10 a.m. on April 24. White went to the hospital and found the crew of the Ruptured Duck. Lawson’s condition had worsened. The Chinese doctor, Chen, had extracted some of the pilot’s loose teeth and enlarged the wound on his left knee to remove loose fragments of his patella. Lawson floated in and out of consciousness, responding only by opening and closing his eyes. He could not eat and was administered glucose intravenously. White wired Chungking for an airdrop of supplies, specifically an officer’s medical field kit, a complete blood transfusion kit, morphine, surgical dressing and either sulfadiazine, sulfathiazole, or sulfanilamide.
In his first report White noted that Lawson had a compound fracture of the left patella with a deep laceration six inches long, extending into the knee joint and nearly severing the tendons. He had other lacerations on his left shin, chin, and lip, and a deep gash on his cheek, plus two more on his scalp. By White’s count Lawson had lost his upper three incisors and canine teeth. “All of the wounds were hideously infected with a very virulent organism, apparently one of the fecal-contamination type of symbiotic, anaerobic bacteria,” he later wrote. “The whole leg was swollen, crepitant and fluctuant with a foul watery discharge issuing from every opening. There was an area of dry gangrene over the inner aspect of his ankle. Motion of the knee-joint was of course extremely painful and Ted was delirious most of the time from weakness and toxic absorption.”
The worst injury was the one to Lawson’s left leg. White was determined to save it if possible and tore apart the hospital in search of precious medicines, finally finding some Japanese brand sulfanilamide, though he doubted its potency. He immediately started Lawson on it and then drained his infected wounds. “The area of gangrene over his left ankle was insensitive and I was able to excise with scissors with a minimum of discomfort,” he wrote. “My labors were rewarded when over a cupful of stinking material gushed forth.” White couldn’t help marveling at how Lawson and the other injured fliers from the Ruptured Duck had gone four days without any medical help, a point he would later highlight in his report. “The fact that Ted and Dean were still alive,” he wrote, “is just one of the many miracles which occurred on that memorable April 18th!”
THE JAPANESE LOADED THE CREW of the Bat out of Hell onto a transport plane to Nanking the afternoon of April 20, touching down around five. Guards ushered the raiders into the back seats of separate 1938 four-door Fords with guards on either side. Hite could look out from under his blindfold at the chaotic city where dogs, donkeys, and children scattered about the streets. Guards tossed the fliers into individual cells with wooden bars that measured just four by eight feet. A can served as the toilet; the only other furnishing consisted of a damp blanket to cover up with atop the hard wooden floor. Watchful guards paced the prison passageways.
The Japanese pulled DeShazer out of his cell that evening and dragged him into an interrogation room occupied by several officers, one of whom spoke English with a lot of slang. The exhausted airman had been blindfolded now for twelve hours and had gone even longer since his last meal, but he still refused to cooperate. The officers taunted the blindfolded bombardier, threatening to execute him if he didn’t talk, at other times getting into his face and laughing. This proved to be only the warm-up until guards dragged him into yet another room and yanked off his blindfold. DeShazer looked up to find a squat Japanese man with a large paunch who smoked a cigar.
“I’m the kindest judge in all China,” the Japanese man said through an interpreter. “You’re very fortunate to be questioned by me.”
Everyone sat down.
“Doolittle was your commanding officer, was that true?” the judge asked.
“I won’t talk,” DeShazer answered.
“You’re our property and we want you to talk,” the judge admonished him. “We’ll treat you very good.”
“How do you pronounce H-O-R-N-E-T?”
“Hornet,” DeShazer answered.
“That’s the aircraft carrier you flew off of to bomb Japan,” the judge stated.
“I won’t talk,” DeShazer repeated.
“Sixteen B-25s took off the Hornet and bombed Japan,” the judge continued. “Is that true?”
“I won’t talk.”
The judge continued to pepper DeShazer with questions, and each time the flier refused to answer, prompting the judge to finally slam his fist down on the table. “When you speak,” he demanded, “look me straight in the eye!”
DeShazer did as ordered, but the judge only grew more enraged, finally yanking his sword from his side. DeShazer’s eyes focused on the bright steel blade.
“Tomorrow morning when the sun comes up, I’m going to cut your head off,” the judge barked. “What do you think of that?”
DeShazer had no idea how to respond, but knew he needed to say something—then it hit him. “Well,” the bombardier answered, “I think that would be a great honor to have the kindest judge in all China cut my head off.”
The courtroom erupted in laughter.
The Japanese likewise pulled Bobby Hite from his cell, dragging him into an interrogation room with a major and an interpreter. Four guards stood watch.
“You will please to sit down,” the interpreter said. “Do you care to smoke?”
Hite spied a package of White Owl cigars and cigarettes on the table. He reached out for the latter, but the interpreter pulled them back.
“You may have them afterward,” he said.
“After what?”
“After you tell us what we want to know.”
“I’m a prisoner of war,” the Texan replied. “I am not required to give any more than my name, rank and serial number which I have done.”
“You will give us more!” the interpreter screamed at him. “If you don’t, we will have you shot where you sit!”
The Japanese proceeded to drill Hite about the Hornet and Doolittle, but the pilot decided to dodge, claiming that he had flown instead from the Aleutians.
“You couldn’t fly that far,” the Japanese countered.
“We could and we did.”
George Barr suffered a brutal night after he, too, refused to answer questions put to him by a board of officers. Guards led him downstairs and past a room where he spotted DeShazer surrounded by Japanese shoving pencils between his fingers.
Barr landed in his own interrogation room along with several Japanese enlisted men. Handcuffed and blindfolded, the navigator never saw the punches; he could only feel the pain as the Japanese pummeled his face and body. An officer entered the room and ordered the men to stop. The Japanese pulled Barr’s blindfold off but left him handcuffed, questioning him with the aid of a civilian interpreter.
Barr refused to talk. The Japanese laid him on the floor, shoved rags in his mouth, and poured water over his face. He felt the water run down his nostrils, but he couldn’t cough it out. He felt he would drown.
The Japanese stopped, and the officer asked Barr whether he was ready to talk. The navigator refused and the torture started again. “The water was going down into my lungs,” Barr later testified. “It just stopped your breathing.”
The officer looked on as Barr struggled. The torture continued for twenty minutes before Barr felt he could no longer tolerate it. He would talk. Barr confessed that the fliers had taken off from an aircraft carrier. The guards led him back to his cell.
The raiders suffered a long night in the vermin-infested jail. Someone even stole DeShazer’s watch. “My hands were tied and my legs were tied,” he recalled. “I laid there with my clothes on, the lice just crawling all over me.”
The guards hauled the Americans outside the next morning, photographed them, and then loaded them aboard an airplane, handcuffed, blindfolded, and tied with ropes. DeShazer stole peeks outside the window and saw only empty water as the plane droned on for hours. He eventually spotted an iconic landmark—Mount Fuji—that told him exactly where he was going. His destination, he knew at that moment, was Tokyo.
THE JAPANESE LOADED Dean Hallmark, Bob Meder, and Chase Nielsen into chairs and carried them several miles over a mountain trail to the garrison, arriving around 5:30 p.m. “Nobody said anything to us on the trip, but the soldiers kept looking at us, grinning and nodding. I couldn’t think much,” Nielsen later wrote. “I tried to work out a plan, but nothing seemed feasible. I made up my mind I’d do the best I could and if I had to I’d kill some Japs before they killed me.”
At the garrison the Japanese fed the men boiled eggs and vegetable sandwiches before marching them down to a dock and aboard a diesel-powered boat. The airmen changed boats at Ning-po, but otherwise spent the four-day trip handcuffed in a tiny cabin, the only furnishing a grass mat. At night the Japanese even cuffed the airmen’s legs together. Meals consisted of eggs, vegetable soup, and pastries. At about 2:30 p.m. on April 24, the boat reached Shanghai, a fact Nielsen surmised when he spotted signs along the waterfront for the Shanghai Power Company and Shanghai Docks.
The Japanese blindfolded the airmen upon arrival and tethered each one to a guard with a rope around the waist. Guards then placed the fliers in separate cars and drove them to an airport about twenty minutes away, locking them into narrow individual cells. Nielsen hardly had time to settle in before guards pulled him out and led him to an interrogation room. The cramped room was hot and had a single window, the bottom half of which was frosted and blocked his view outside. Six officers sat around a table along with one enlisted man and a civilian interpreter. The Japanese offered Nielsen a cup of tea, which he awkwardly drank with handcuffs.
One of the officers started the interrogation. Where did Nielsen come from and what was he doing in China?
The navigator gave only his name, rank, and serial number.
The interrogators slapped him about the face and head—by his own estimate as many as thirty times—making his ears ring. Others kicked him in the shins hard enough to draw blood. With his hands cuffed behind the chair and his ankles tied to the legs, he was powerless to defend himself.
“We have methods of making you talk,” the interpreter told him. “You understand, nobody in your country know you alive. If we happen to torture you to death your people think you missing in action. You want to talk now?”
Nielsen again refused. “That crack about my folks never knowing what became of me sort of got me, but I was so tired that my feelings didn’t register,” he recalled. “He was watching me closely and he seemed disappointed at my reaction.”
The officer snapped his finger and issued a guttural order, triggering the door to burst open. Nielsen watched as four husky enlisted men marched inside. “There was absolutely no expression on their faces,” he later wrote. “They seized me, hauled me to my feet and though I tried to resist at first they tossed me on the floor without any trouble. One held my handcuffed arms. Two others held my legs. The fourth put a towel over my face, arranging it in a cup-like fashion over my mouth and nose.”
The guard then poured water over his face. To his horror Nielsen felt the tepid liquid run into his mouth and nostrils. “A man has to breathe,” he recalled. “Every breath I took I sucked water into my lungs.”
Nielsen struggled to fight back. He turned his head and managed to suck in a mouthful of air before the guard forced his head back. He likewise fought without success to move his arms and legs. He started to lose consciousness. “I felt more or less like I was drowning,” he recalled, “just gasping between life and death.”
Seconds before he blacked out, guards jerked him upright. He coughed and sputtered as the interpreter pressed him to talk.
Nielsen again refused.
A snap of the fingers once again started the horror. “With the water trickling steadily into my mouth and nose I began to go out—quicker this time,” he later wrote. “I was too weak to struggle. Just as a black cloud seemed to be settling over me I was jerked to my feet, slugged in the jaw and shoved into the chair.”
“Talk,” the interpreter barked.
Exhausted and half drowned, Nielsen shook his head no. He couldn’t help noticing the smile that crept across the faces of the guards, one of whom retrieved a large bamboo pole about three inches in diameter. Nielsen thought the men might beat him with it, but instead the Japanese slid it behind the back of his knees and then twisted his handcuffed arms backward until he kneeled. Pain pierced his legs. The officers grinned at Nielsen, now in such pain he felt himself begin to panic.
“I can’t stand this too long,” he thought.
Noises echoed down the hall and Nielsen suspected Hallmark and Meder suffered the same. “The sweat was pouring down my face and into my eyes,” he wrote. “I felt dizzy and weak. I could see the sun shining through the upper part of the window and I thought if I could just get outside I might have a chance to make a break for it.”
One of the officers slipped off his shoes. He then brought the heel of his foot down on Nielsen’s knees. “With each blow it felt as though my kneecap was actually coming loose, but the pain wasn’t so great now because my legs had grown numb,” Nielsen later recalled. “It was something like the sensation you feel when a dentist pulls a tooth he has first deadened with novocaine.”
The torture dragged on for ten minutes before the guards jerked Nielsen to his feet. He collapsed as soon as the Japanese released him, his legs unable to support him. The officers laughed at him as he struggled to pull himself up.
Guards reached down and picked Nielsen up, dumping him back in his chair. Though exhausted and battered, Nielsen now fumed. The officers stared at him and he glared back. The interpreter asked if he wanted to talk.
“I’ve given you all the information I have,” he replied.
The Japanese then slid a pencil-sized rod between his forefinger and middle finger, then squeezed his fingers together while another guard slid the rod back and forth. “I could feel the edges of the pencil slowing cutting the membrane and the sides of my fingers,” he later wrote. “I could feel when the blood started. It was a nasty pain, quite different from the bamboo rod torture. It got to your nerves more.”
Nielsen refused to surrender.
“Well,” the interpreter told him, “this is the start of your treatment and you might be interested to know that we have a lot more splendid devices like this. We’ll get the information we want if we have to torture you to death.”
“We’ll see about that,” Nielsen thought.
Some of the officers left the interrogation room, but one returned moments later, bragging that Nielsen’s friends had confessed. Why should Nielsen continue to suffer since the Japanese now knew all the details of the raid?
“Tell it to me and I’ll see if you got it right,” Nielsen said.
“Oh, no,” the officer said, chuckling. “You tell it to us.”
Nielsen again refused.
Guards twisted the navigator’s arms until he dropped to his knees. Others slapped his face and kicked him in the shins.
“How do you like that?” the interpreter would occasionally interject. “Do you want to say anything now?”
The abuse dragged on until the guards appeared to tire. “If you insist on not telling us anything we might as well finish the job right away,” the interpreter told him. “You will face the firing squad for execution immediately.”
Guards slipped a blindfold over Nielsen’s eyes and led him outside. He felt the sun on his face and gravel under his feet. The guards pushed him along, holding tight to his arms. He always knew that, if he was captured, the Japanese might execute him, but he never truly believed it—until now. “My mind was in a whirl and I couldn’t think straight,” he recalled. “It’s awfully hard to understand that you are about to die, especially when you are not conscious of having done anything wrong. I didn’t feel fear then; just a numbness in my body and an empty feeling in my stomach.”
Nielsen heard men marching behind him and thought it must be the firing squad. His throat went dry and his heart stopped. Guards had marched him about a thousand feet down the path when he heard a guttural command. The soldiers stopped, and he heard rifle butts hit the gravel. Guards pushed Nielsen a few feet farther down the path and then turned him. “The sweat was pouring down my face and neck now,” he recalled. “I wanted desperately to wipe my face, but my hands were cuffed.”
He heard another command and the sound of what he suspected were rifles being raised and aimed. No one held on to him now. He thought he might run for it, but he knew it would be futile with his blindfold and handcuffs. “My whole life flashed in front of my mind’s eye,” he later wrote. “I remembered how my dad and I used to go hunting and fishing back in Utah when I was a boy. I thought of my wife, Thora. I realized suddenly that my folks might never know what had become of me and that thought was agonizing. Somehow a man feels a little better if he is certain that those he loves know what happened to him. I began to feel weak. I thought my heart was actually going to stop. It would pound and jump and there seemed to be long pauses between the beats.”
“Well, well, well,” the interpreter said. “We are all Knights of the Bushido of the Rising Sun and we don’t execute men at sundown. It is now sundown, so your execution will take place in the morning. We will shoot you then unless you decide to talk in the meantime.”
Nielsen felt his heartbeat finally slow as his rage increased. “If you boys don’t shoot me now,” he thought, “you won’t shoot me in the morning.”
Guards dragged him back to his cell. He heard Hallmark’s voice down the hall as the Japanese likewise locked up the Green Hornet’s pilot after an afternoon of similar treatment. Several guards arrived at Nielsen’s cell around 6 p.m., hanging him by his handcuffs on a wooden peg high up on the wall. His toes barely touched the floor. He realized he was helpless; any movement only hurt his wrists more. “Panic seized me then. I didn’t think I could stand that punishment very long,” he later wrote. “In a few minutes the pain in my wrists was so intense that I was almost sick to my stomach. Then stabs of pain began to shoot through my chest and shoulders.”
He shouted for help, but no one came. The minutes ticked past. An hour turned to two and then three. He finally passed out. “There were periods of consciousness,” he recalled, “but the entire night is like a horrible dream in my memory.”
Nielsen woke the next morning at daybreak as the guards pulled him down off the wall. “When I let my arms down I thought they were both going to drop off,” he said. “My arms were numb, my shoulders were numb, I was numb clear to the waist.”
Guards blindfolded him and led him out of his cell. When the Japanese removed his blindfold, he spotted Hallmark and Meder. The men looked haggard, but exchanged the thumbs-up sign. Guards blindfolded the fliers, drove them to the airport, and loaded them aboard a transport plane, tying each of the handcuffed aviators to his seat. The plane roared down the runway. “I could see a little bit out of my blindfold and we seemed to be flying toward the sun,” Nielsen recalled. “I figured Tokyo was the goal.”