Don’t forget, America—make sure that every flier that comes here has a special pass to hell, and rest assured it’s strictly a one-way ticket.
—TOKYO RADIO, APRIL 21, 1943
THE AIRCREWS TRICKLED IN day after day to Chuchow. Davy Jones and his men arrived first on April 19, followed by the crews of Bill Bower, Ross Greening, and Jack Hilger. Sometimes an entire crew arrived; occasionally, just a single aviator. By the time Doolittle appeared on April 26, fifty-six airmen had been found. After days alone in the Chinese wilderness the reunions among friends were heartfelt, a sentiment best captured by Hilger in his diary. “It was like a homecoming and we were all as happy as kids,” he wrote. “There’s nothing like a familiar face in a foreign country.”
Arrival in Chuchow capped an exotic adventure for most of the raiders, who had hiked down out of the mountains, often aided by Chinese guerrillas, villagers, and even a few foreign missionaries. “Everywhere we went we were the center of attraction and everyone seemed to know all about us,” navigator Carl Wildner recalled. “We were oddities as well as celebrities.” In many cases the Americans found themselves welcomed in villages and towns by local politicians and military leaders; a few even held parades. That was the case for Jones and his copilot, Hoss Wilder, who stepped off a train in Yushan to find a beaming gentleman dressed in Western clothes at the forefront of a crowd of hundreds. “I am Danny Wang, mayor of Yushan,” he announced in English. “This reception is in your honor as American heroes!”
The raiders had marveled at the ancient walled cities of Iwu and Kuangfeng, the latter’s cobblestone alleys rubbed smooth by more than a millennium of passing footsteps. “It was the kind of Chinese city I had read about,” Hilger wrote in his diary, “but never really believed in.” Others, such as navigator Eugene McGurl, were shocked by the poverty and sickness he witnessed: “Signs of every known disease could be seen even on smallest children,” he wrote in his journal. “Shops were dens of filth & disease.” Though gunner Adam Williams went so far as to shoot and roast a pheasant, many of the others choked down the local cuisine, from rice and greens to delicacies like fried snake and boiled pigeon eggs. Navigator Clayton Campbell even got a special taste of what he referred to as chow dog: “The Chinese pluck the hair from a dog like feathers are plucked from a chicken and the animal is cooked with the skin on.”
At Chuchow the Chinese housed the aviators at barracks about ten miles from the airfield, complete with a bomb shelter dug out of rock. Local officers translated newspapers with datelines from London, Berlin, and Tokyo that recounted the raid’s success, and they spoiled the American aviators with long-saved luxuries of condensed milk and tinned beef and even the last of the two-year-old canned butter. The after-action reports and personal diaries of the raiders universally praised the warmth and aid of the Chinese, to many of whom the raiders gave trinkets as small tokens of appreciation, from cigarettes to pocket change. One of the pilots gave his white silk parachute to an engaged missionary couple so that she could use it to fashion a wedding dress. “These people are the most sincere, grateful, and just plain wonderful people I have ever seen,” Jones raved in his diary, “and they have been fighting for 5 years.”
The celebrations were tempered by the confirmed death of Leland Faktor. The Chinese had stripped the gunner naked—no doubt to salvage his clothes—and carried him out of the wilds lashed to a long pole, much like a slaughtered animal. Rumors circulated that two other bodies had been spotted along the coast and three more discovered in the wreckage of a plane. Reports indicated the Japanese had captured at least a few of the aviators, while others had suffered serious injuries, including Lawson. Many of the fliers saw such injuries firsthand when Charles Ozuk limped into Chuchow, a scene captured by Joseph Manske in his diary: “He had the worst cut in his leg I’d ever seen in my life.” Some of the fliers blamed the losses on the Navy for forcing them to take off early, rechristening the Hornet with the diminutive nickname the Housefly.
The airmen passed the days playing poker. Davy Jones, whose mustache had grown so long that he earned the nickname Fu Man Jones, lost seven dollars in a single night. Other times the aviators swapped stories of their adventures in China, trying to outdo one another. “When we met up,” Hank Potter recalled, “each had a story of a horrible ordeal and wanted to tell it. But none of us wanted to listen because we all had one of our own.” One such tale that would even find its way into an official report concerned a sergeant, found after two days in the wild by a Chinese couple. The family invited the airman home, fed him, and then put him to bed. Much to the exhausted aviator’s surprise, the couple climbed in with him. “He was so tired that he didn’t even mind when the man took care of his husbandly duties,” the report stated. “If they didn’t mind his presence, he sure as hell didn’t care, just so they didn’t keep him awake.”
Japanese bombers pummeled Chuchow daily in retaliation for the raid, forcing the aviators to spend long hours crowded inside the shelter. The Chinese had no forces to counter the attacks, and the American fliers felt frustrated to sit idly by as the enemy returned again and again. “We called our home the Chu Chow bombing range,” Ken Reddy wrote in his diary, “for that is all it amounted to—practice for the Japanese.” Bill Bower agreed. “It’s a crime,” he griped in his diary. “No sign of opposition. Just one airplane would be all we need. Too bad one of us couldn’t have landed.” The men emerged each day to see the horrific results of the Japanese assaults, particularly the strafing attacks against civilians. “Frequently, bodies were stacked like cordwood along the roadside until they could be taken away for burial,” Greening later wrote. “It was a depressing sight to us. We hadn’t encountered anything like this before.”
Under Greening’s command the first group of twenty raiders—each presented with a new white silk shirt—climbed aboard a train the evening of April 25 to begin the first leg of a four-day journey west to Chungking. The aviators crowded inside wooden berthing compartments and were soon asleep in the hard narrow bunks. “The rails don’t click, they jolt,” Bower complained in his diary, “but it’s much better transportation than that of last week.” Chinese trains ran largely at night to avoid Japanese attacks, so at dawn the raiders disembarked at Ying-tan, enjoying a delicious breakfast at the Catholic mission with a Dutch priest and Father Bill Glynn of Chicago; these were some of the same missionaries who had helped Harold Watson and Edgar McElroy. “Ham and eggs,” Bower wrote, “but best of all cornfritters with brown sugar and molasses.”
The aviators crowded aboard a rickety bus after breakfast and set off on an eleven-hour trip over dirt roads that would cover barely 150 miles, stopping for the night in a nice hotel in the ancient city of Ning Lee. “The courtyard outside is without a doubt the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in China,” Jack Hilger wrote in his diary when he visited a few days later. “There is a small lake with a pavilion and bridge and the entire courtyard is shaded by an immense camphor tree which must have a spread of 200 feet. The full moon shining through completes the effect and makes all of us lonesome.” The raiders enjoyed the newfound luxury even if the hotel still depended on oil lights. “I got my first Chinese shave here,” Reddy wrote in his diary. “If you don’t stop them they shave your ears, nose, forehead, and between your eyes.”
The raiders set out again early the next morning for another long and tiresome bus ride, passing through miles of uncultivated lands void of even cattle or sheep. The bus stopped in Toho, where the fliers dined with a local commissioner and met the governor, before pressing on to Kian, spending the night of April 27 in a new hostel operated by the American Volunteer Group under Claire Chennault. The journey began again early the next morning in a new bus, which crossed several rivers on ferries before reaching a hotel in Heng-yang near midnight. Chungking planned to dispatch a cargo plane to collect the raiders, giving the airmen time to relax that morning. Bower sunbathed, while Reddy enjoyed the spoils of war, a scene he described in his diary: “I rode a Japanese horse, bareback, as the saddle had not been captured, just to say I had been on one.”
A C-47 buzzed the hotel the afternoon of April 29, promising an end to the long journey. “When it flew over with our insignia on the side we all shouted with joy,” Reddy wrote. “It was the most beautiful sight we had witnessed in China.” Colonel Clayton Bissell, General Stilwell’s air operations officer, greeted the airmen as they climbed aboard. The plane never shut down its engines, but roared back into the skies, arriving less than three hours later in China’s wartime capital. Perched atop a promontory between the Yangtze and the Chia-ling Rivers, Chungking was a damp and weathered city whose hot and humid climate left the walls coated with a green slime. Mosquitos clouded the air, while armies of rats and cockroaches marched through narrow streets and alleys that reeked of rotting food, urine, and feces. “There was no escape from the stink that attacked our nostrils at every turn,” one American nurse would later write. “A thin fog hovered around the city; the moisture undoubtedly made the smells more pungent.”
The improvised capital had long been battered by the twin ills of poverty and war. The Time and Life magazine publisher Henry Luce visited in 1941, writing that it was impossible to “distinguish between the great masses of bomb-rubble on the one hand and, on the other, shacks, temporary structures and ordinary homes of the poor.” The Japanese had launched routine raids against Chungking—the world’s first capital to suffer systematic bombings—almost as soon as the Nationalist government arrived, pummeling the city from 1939 to 1941 no fewer than 268 times. The single most savage attack had occurred the afternoon of May 4, 1939, when the Japanese killed 4,400 people and injured another 3,100, an assault witnessed by missionary and author Robert Ekvall. “The city of Chungking boiled in a sudden upheaval of flying wreckage and black dust,” he wrote. “By nightfall the entire horizon was red with fires that threatened to burn the rock of Chungking clean of human life and habitation.”
The war-torn city—named the most bombed spot on Earth by Life magazine in March 1942—showed those scars, prompting one reporter to colorfully compare the clobbered capital to Pompeii. Bombs and fires had leveled and blackened many of the city’s buildings—some rebuilt up to half a dozen times—while the acrid stench of wet ashes hung heavy in the air. Air-raid sirens screamed daily, forcing the city’s half million residents to crowd inside twelve hundred shelters dug deep into the sandstone cliffs, the largest a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel that could accommodate up to twenty thousand people. “Downtown Chungking was all bedlam. The narrow streets crawled with people cawing like flocks of hungry crows,” observed Frank Dorn, one of General Stilwell’s top aides. “The people in the streets, for all their weary smiles and courage, looked whipped and beaten down by the years of struggle that had driven them to this ant hill of a city as a last refuge. Despair was etched deeply in their eyes, profiles, and sagging shoulders.”
The raid against Tokyo eleven days earlier had given Chungking a brief moment of celebration. Residents had crowded around radios, listening to Japanese broadcasts, while Chinese newspapers quickly sold out of extra editions, the ink barely dry. Movie theaters flashed details up on screens, drawing cheers from the audiences. Firecrackers exploded in the skies, while residents stopped Americans on the street to congratulate them. Government officials even declared the day of the attack a holiday. “The nightmare of the Japanese militarists can be shattered only by bombs,” announced Ho Ying-chin, Chungking’s war minister. “These raids on Japan proper are only the beginning.” Just as Americans had hungered to avenge Pearl Harbor, so, too, did the Chinese desire payback for years of bombing. “We have been waiting almost five years for this day,” one resident told the Associated Press. “We are glad that the Japanese people know at last the din of bombs and the smell of explosives.”
Doolittle’s men disembarked from the C-47 that afternoon and were escorted to the American military mission, a small outpost located on a terraced hilltop. The aviators dined that night with Brigadier General John Magruder, the outgoing chief of the American military mission to China, who told them to expect some good news in the morning. Around 9 a.m. on April 30 Bissell, Magruder, and his staff gathered with the twenty raiders. Bissell congratulated the airmen for the successful mission and shared the appreciation of the president, General Marshall, and General Arnold. He then announced that each man had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal first awarded to Charles Lindbergh in honor of his solo flight across the Atlantic.
“We were all astounded,” Ken Reddy wrote in his diary. “For a minute it was as if someone had belted me one in the stomach,” Bill Bower noted in his. “I couldn’t breathe very well,” recalled Ross Greening. “It was the biggest thrill of my life.”
The Chungking-based officers invited the raiders to celebrate that night at a house by the river. Engineer George Larkin cut up his parachute and made scarves, giving them out to the party’s hosts. Wartime inflation had driven the price of a bottle of booze up as high as eighty dollars, forcing the officers to cater the party with bathtub gin made by a local ice company, a fact that didn’t dissuade navigator Eugene McGurl, who wrote in his diary, “Started drinking wine (Chinese variety & potent) about 4:00 p.m. & capped off the evening with Chungking Gin—arguably a highly explosive mixture.”
Chiang Kai-shek invited the raiders to lunch the next day, a scene described by Reddy in his diary: “His home was very lovely inside, having indirect lighting of a Chinese design, soft modernistic chairs, and heavy padded cushions without backs to sit on, individual silver ashtrays, herring bone hardwood floors, and a soft glowing fireplace.” The home’s elegant furnishings contrasted with the battered and bruised raiders. “I’ll bet it was the motliest bunch of men who ever dined with the ruler of any country,” Bower wrote in his diary. “Coveralls, leather jackets, several ties, and everything containing a varied assortment of spots and mud.”
Madame Chiang Kai-shek welcomed the airmen, stealing all the attention. Born in Shanghai to a wealthy family, May-ling Soong started boarding school at age ten at Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia, the world’s first chartered women’s college. She went on to study at Wellesley College near Boston, majoring in English literature and wowing faculty with what the press later called her “Scarlett O’Hara accent.” The forty-four-year-old had returned to China after graduating in 1917, able to speak English better than her native tongue. Beautiful, slender, and often dressed in tight long gowns, Madame Chiang married the generalissimo in 1927, forming a powerful political partnership. General Joseph Stilwell found her far more impressive than her husband, describing her in his diary as “a clever, brainy woman.” “Direct, forceful, energetic, loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history,” he wrote. “Can turn on charm at will. And knows it.”
The raiders loved her. “The Madame is the most impressive character I have ever had the privilege to meet,” Reddy wrote. “She speaks excellent English, and better still she has control of the American slang; she’s brilliant, witty and beautiful.”
The airmen feasted on a multicourse lunch that began with a delicious onion soup, followed by potatoes and cold ham and beef. After that came a dish of chicken, green peas, and noodles. For dessert the aviators enjoyed lemon pie and ice cream, the only time the men savored the sweet frozen treat in China. They washed it down with cups of American coffee. “It was,” Reddy wrote, “our best meal in China.”
The generalissimo arrived midway through lunch. Speaking through an interpreter, he toasted first the airmen and then Roosevelt and victory. Compared with his wife’s, Chiang’s appearance was unremarkable. “He entered the room, apparently harassed and hurried, and made a very short speech,” Greening recalled. “Then he came over, shook hands with me as the ranking representative of our group, and left.”
After lunch the raiders adjourned to the living room with Madame Chiang. Reddy asked her to sign the map in the front of his diary and his Short Snorter Dollar, but Colonel Bissell intervened to halt the autographs seekers. Bissell presented a pair of American wings to Madame Chiang, who confessed that she would also like to have a flight cap, prompting several of the raiders to hand them over. The airmen soon realized that it would probably be best for Doolittle to send a new one once he returned home. “In order to get the size she tried Capt. Greening’s on, and then mine,” Reddy wrote in his diary. “The latter fit OK.” Greening presented her with a set of Air Forces and Seventeenth Bombardment Group insignia. “I had a bit of an embarrassing time,” he later wrote, “fumbling around trying to find somewhere to pin them on her.”
The airmen returned to their quarters at the mission that afternoon, only to be summoned again around 9:30 p.m. to the drawing room. They received instructions on how to behave moments before Madame Chiang arrived with an entourage of local officials. Reddy noticed she wore the wings the men had presented her earlier in the day “in a conspicuous place over her heart.” Camera flash bulbs popped and motion picture cameras rolled as she presented the raiders with distinguished service medals. She then posed for pictures with the airmen, standing in front of Reddy.
“This should make my girl at home jealous,” the pilot mumbled to the aviator next to him.
“Blonde or brunette?” Madame Chiang asked.
She also presented each airman with a personal letter, thanking him for the raid. “The entire Chinese people are grateful to you,” she wrote. “May you continue to vindicate freedom and justice so that by your efforts a happier and more unselfish world society will evolve when victory is ours.”
The raiders were thrilled by her graciousness. “Praise be it. Red Letter day,” Bower wrote in his diary. “We all never expected anything like this and surely know of others who have sacrificed much more often in this war for no recognition.”
The airmen used the downtime in Chungking to unwind from the adventures of the previous few weeks. Bower explored the chaotic city but got lost, which he noted in his diary was “almost as bad as being lost in the Chinese mountains.” He managed to buy a bottle of vodka and three orange squeezes, which set him back eighty-five dollars. Joseph Manske spent much of his time on his back, recovering from malaria, while Reddy visited a doctor to x-ray his banged-up knee and stitch up the cut on his head.
The first group of twenty aviators shipped out for India on May 3, piling into the same C-47 cargo plane that had just delivered Doolittle, Jack Hilger, and nineteen more raiders to Chungking. The second group of airmen had followed the same course as the previous ones, traveling by train, bus, and plane to the wartime capital. Doolittle had left Davy Jones and Brick Holstrom in Chuchow to await any stragglers and bring them along later. He also sent for John Birch, requesting that the missionary oversee the burial of Leland Faktor.
Birch held a memorial for Faktor near Chuchow—the same afternoon Doolittle touched down in Chungking—attended by thirteen of the raiders. Birch tried to use the $2,000 in Chinese currency Doolittle left him to buy a burial plot, but the Chinese informed him that international law prohibited the sale, offering instead to lease a plot for free for a hundred years. “Shall accept,” Birch cabled Chungking, “if not otherwise instructed.” The country magistrate at Sheui Chang donated the coffin, though air raids slowed preparation of the grave and stone for two weeks. At 5 p.m. on May 19 near the military headquarters at Wan Tsuen—and with two hundred of the base personnel in attendance—Faktor was buried with military honors provided by the Chinese air force.
Doolittle meanwhile arrived in Chungking to learn that his earlier fears were unfounded. Arnold had cabled a congratulatory message on April 22. “On your truly wonderful and magnificent flight I wish to congratulate you and all members of your organization in behalf of myself personally and for the entire Army Air Forces,” the general wrote. “Fully realized are the conditions unforeseen which arose to make your task an almost impossible one. Your achievement is made all the more glorious by the fact that you surmounted these unforeseen conditions.”
A message from General Marshall also awaited him. “The President sends his thanks and congratulations to you and your command for the highly courageous and determined manner in which you carried out your hazardous mission and for the great service you have rendered to the nation and to the Allied cause,” Marshall cabled. “Your nomination as a brigadier general goes to the Senate this morning. To me your leadership has been a great inspiration and fills me with confidence for the future.”
Doolittle had learned on April 28 that Arnold had promoted him to brigadier general. He would for the second time in his career skip a rank, a promotion he knew would only reinforce the idea of some of his contemporaries that he was Arnold’s fair-haired boy. Doolittle did not have any stars to wear, so Clayton Bissell, who also had just been promoted to general, gave him a set. “He offered me a swig from his high-priced Scotch whiskey in celebration and I took a large gulp, which he didn’t appreciate,” Doolittle recalled. “He estimated my gulp was worth about $80.” Doolittle’s men were thrilled at the news of his promotion, as Hilger recorded in his diary: “We’re all as happy as if each one of us had been made a general too.”
The rest of the raiders received the Distinguished Flying Cross, and, like the earlier group, met with Chiang. Doolittle later had the cap he wore over Tokyo cleaned and then gold braid sewn into it before he sent it to Madame Chiang. “My second in command, Jack Hilger, received the highest Chinese decoration,” he recalled. “Then when I walked in, Chiang and his wife looked at each other and realized that something had gone wrong with the presentation ceremony—they didn’t have a decoration to give me. Chiang looked toward one of his highly decorated generals, approached him, and removed a beautiful decoration from around his neck. He then hung it on me. It is said that the Chinese are emotionless, but that general sure showed emotion when stripped of his medal by the Generalissimo!”
Doolittle’s copilot, Dick Cole, used his downtime in the Chinese capital to fire off a letter to his parents back home in Ohio. “I realize you are probably both worried and wondering as to my whereabouts and safety. The long silence on my part was imperative and someday you will know why,” he wrote. “It is pretty hard to write a letter without writing about your activities, but I guess it’s O.K. to tell you that I have had my first taste of combat and find it not too bad. ‘Lady Luck’ is still riding on my shoulder and I hope she stays there in the future.” Cole closed with an observation of how the raid had affected him and his views. “The last four weeks have vindicated my life-long opinion—that there is no place as good as the United States—No place.”
Each of the raiders who passed through Chungking sat down and completed a detailed report of the raid and its aftermath under the supervision of Colonel Merian Cooper, one of the Army Air Forces’s more colorful officers. A forty-eight-year-old former bomber pilot, Cooper was wounded in aerial combat behind enemy lines during World War I, suffering severe burns and sitting out the rest of the war in a German hospital. He recovered and flew volunteer missions against the Russians in the 1919–21 Polish-Soviet war, where in July 1920 he was shot down again and captured. Cooper managed to escape after ten months in prison, a feat that required him to slit the throat of a Russian soldier. Cooper’s thirst for exploration and adventure proved a natural fit in Hollywood—The New Yorker dubbed him the “T. E. Lawrence of the movies”—where he went on to create the 1933 film classic King Kong. Like Doolittle, Cooper had remained in the Army Reserves, requesting foreign duty as soon as the war broke out.
As the debriefing officer for the raid, Cooper would ultimately sit down with fifty-nine of the raiders, including Doolittle. “I can remember you well—open neck, unshaved, dirty clothes, but still full of fire,” Cooper wrote in a 1971 personal letter to Doolittle. “You gave me the map I still have, marking where you thought your lost crews were, in your handwriting.” Hilger described the debriefing experience in his diary. “It seems that I have done nothing but write all day long,” he griped on May 5. “It has taken us longer to write the reports on this mission than to fly it.”
Doolittle departed May 5 for the United States flush with the one hundred dollars Cooper had lent him to cover any expenses, a debt the general repaid to Cooper’s wife in Alexandria, Virginia. “Had it not been for his kindness—and affluence, I would have had the Devil’s own time getting home,” Doolittle wrote her. “As it was, I arrived just about destitute.” Just before Doolittle left, Cooper made him a promise. “I told you I would do the best I could for all your men,” he later wrote to him. “I did.”
Armed with Doolittle’s map of where the missing crews likely were captured—and information provided by the generalissimo’s chief of intelligence and secret police—Cooper proposed a rescue operation and requested $10,000 in gold coins for bribery. “I had used gold coins in my explorations in the 1920’s in Persia, Arabia, Siam, Abyssinia, etc., and found they worked magic when paper money meant nothing,” he wrote. “I felt gold coins would do the same in China and among the Japanese.”
Cooper outlined his plan to Bissell, who then gave him the go-ahead. “I told him that I would either bring back the prisoners alive, or I would not come back. I meant I would be dead. I did not intend to be captured and tortured by the Japanese and then executed,” Cooper later wrote to Doolittle. “If it was evident that I was going to be captured by the Japanese, I intended to kill myself; but I didn’t think this would happen. I felt quite confident I could bring out the Doolittle crew prisoners alive.”
The next morning, when Cooper went to retrieve the gold, Bissell told him the operation had been killed. Cooper never learned why, though it would haunt him for decades. “I was pretty broken up by the cancellation of my proposed rescue mission. I thought I was eminently qualified to carry it through successfully. After all, I had escaped from a Russian prison near Moscow—after ten months there—and walked over 200 miles, living in the open, in dangerous Communist country, stealing and begging food from the peasants, sleeping in the melting snow, and swimming over one hundred ice-cold streams and rivers,” he wrote years later to Doolittle. “I have never written the story of my escape, as it looks too fantastic and incredible. But I considered it more difficult than rescuing your men—but they didn’t let me.”
TED LAWSON’S CONDITION continued to deteriorate. He suffered a terrible night on April 25, forcing Doc White to give him a blood transfusion. The doctor recruited Griffith Williams to serve as the donor, since he and Lawson shared type A blood. “I had no means of doing a proper crossmatching so had to take the chance of sub-groups and a reaction,” White later wrote in his unpublished memoir. “We had the expected trouble with clogging needles and syringes, but managed to get in 150 cc the first try and later after cleaning and boiling the outfit, 200 cc on the second try. Ted seemed stronger afterward.”
Missionary Frank England held a prayer service at the hospital the next morning for the aviators, and then White accompanied England to his home, where he built a modified Rodger Anderson splint to help Lawson’s leg. “Installing the splint was a painful process,” White wrote, “but immobolizing the knee joint and elevating the leg made him more comfortable and I hoped would improve drainage.”
The magistrate brought the aviators a large basket of oranges, while other municipal and military officials arrived with gifts of raisins, grapefruit, wine, and canned butter. A group of children came from a town forty miles away to deliver 450 eggs.
On April 27 Smith, Williams, Sessler, Saylor, and Thatcher departed via sedan chair for Chuchow, leaving behind White and the injured airmen. “We all sent letters out with them,” White wrote. “We felt pretty lonesome after they had gone.”
Lawson continued to struggle, prompting White the next day to give him chloroform and operate on his leg to enlarge his wounds and improve drainage. The procedure almost proved too much for Lawson. “Ted stopped breathing,” White wrote. “I had some anxious moments before we could get him going properly again.”
The surgery appeared to help. The next day White dressed his wounds, which he noted in his diary looked much better. Afterward he went into town, where he bought a thermos for $120 and twenty tablets of sulfanilamide for $40. Lawson’s reprieve proved short-lived. By May 1 his leg again looked bad, leading White to grind up his entire supply of sulfanilamide tablets into power, which he applied to his wounds.
A local doctor from the Plague Prevention Unit and Public Health Hospital at Kinwah arrived with morphine, more sulfanilamide, and a blood transfusion kit. White went to work immediately. Both Clever and McClure were still weak, so rather than take a full pint from either, he took just enough from both to give Lawson 500 cubic centimeters. “Lawson no better,” White wrote in diary on May 3. “I’m afraid he’ll lose that leg.”
White wired Chunking the next day after the Sunday service to see whether it might be possible to dispatch a seaplane that could land on the river, but he received no response. “By Monday Lawson was in such poor shape that it was evident that both his leg and his neck could not be saved,” White later wrote. “So we decided to amputate.”
The doctor appeared next to Lawson’s bed on May 4. The pilot sensed White’s sudden unease and asked whether he planned to take his leg.
“Yeah,” the doctor said. “I think so.”
White was stoic; the situation, nonnegotiable. “Doc didn’t ask me how I felt about it,” Lawson later recalled. “So, after a bit, I said I wished he’d get started. All I could think of now was getting rid of that damned thing.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” White answered.
The Parkers entered and tried to comfort Lawson with talk of his wife and soon-to-be-delivered baby, while Chen explained that the men planned to use spinal anesthesia, an ampoule of novocaine smuggled out of Shanghai at White’s request.
Lawson tried to joke that the surgery would make him walk with a shoe with high instep, but White failed to answer. He knew then the doctor planned to amputate more than just his foot and ankle. He pressed White on where he planned to cut.
“Above the knee,” he said. “I’ll leave you as much as I can.”
Lawson asked why he couldn’t cut lower.
“If I did that, I might not get enough off. Then there would have to be another one,” White said, “and your system couldn’t take it.”
The men rolled Lawson on his side, and White injected the novocaine into his lower spine. Attendants moved him onto a stretcher and carried him to the second-floor operating room in a nearby building.
Mrs. Smith sterilized the packs and instruments, many of which, White noted, were of 1890s vintage. She and Chen then scrubbed in along with White. Lawson would be awake during the surgery, but numb from the waist down.
The surgical team used drapes to block off the infected part of Lawson’s left leg and cinched a tourniquet as high on the thigh as possible. “We had to make our skin incision about the middle of the thigh in order to get a decent margin of healthy tissue above the infected area,” White later wrote in his memoir. “I made fairly large skin flaps and undercut each layer of muscle as I came to it. The large vessels were clamped and tied as we came to them, though because of the tourniquet they naturally didn’t bleed. The large nerves were dissected up a short ways and cut.”
Lawson remained awake as the doctor worked. “I couldn’t see any blood, or feel anything. But I knew he was cutting,” he later wrote. “I could see his arm moving and see him lift my leg up so he could cut underneath.”
Sensation started to return to the toes on Lawson’s right foot. He told White that he could feel his ankle. The anesthetic was wearing off—and there wasn’t any more. Two Chinese nurses came alongside Lawson and held his wrists down.
Lawson watched as White prepared to saw off his leg. “Doc stepped away and walked back quickly with a silver saw,” he wrote. “It made a strange, faraway, soggy sound as he sawed through the bone. Except for the tugging fear that I was coming back too soon, the actual amputation was almost as impersonal to me as watching a log being sawed. I could hear the different sounds of the saw as Doc’s elbow bent and straightened, bent and straightened and the teeth went through thicker and thinner sections. Then there was an almost musical twink, and deep, deep silence inside me as Doc laid aside the saw. The Chinese nurses let go of my wrists. The nurse on the right walked around to the left side of the table. She picked up the leg by the ankle. The other nurse picked up the other, thicker end. I watched the two nurses carry it out the door.”
White beveled the edges of Lawson’s bone and then began to close the wound layer by layer, using raw silk suture ties. More sensation returned to Lawson’s right leg, making the pilot nervous.
“Just a few more now,” White assured him.
Lawson watched the doctor’s arm rise and fall with each suture.
“Just one more,” he said and then finished.
White gave Lawson another blood transfusion. He had tapped out his type A donors, so he used his own. It was fortunate in that his blood was type O, commonly known as the universal blood type because it can safely be given to anyone. “The next day,” White wrote, “Ted was better. He was comfortable for the first time since the accident and was lucid for the first time in weeks.”
The news of the May 6 surrender of American forces on Corregidor arrived as Lawson convalesced, a sad final chapter to the five-month struggle to hold the Philippines.
The following day White noted with alarm that Lawson was running a low-grade fever, leading the doctor to give him a second pint of his own blood, but Lawson continued to deteriorate. The next day his stump was infected, he stopped eating, and he grew delirious. White could do little more than change his dressing—the wound continued to discharge pus—and give him an intravenous injection and morphine.
Lawson fell into a semiconscious state plagued by the same bad dream. “It was screwy,” he said. “I thought I was in a small rowboat, off the coast of China. I was rowing and making good time, but someone would always make me change into another boat. The new boat would have no oars. I’d tried to get back in my old boat, but I could never find it. I’d find a lot of rowboats but they’d have no oars.”
The other aviators watched in alarm as one of the Chinese hospital attendants entered Lawson’s room with a Bible. “He is very sick,” the attendant told the men. “Maybe he won’t be here long.”
The news rattled Lawson’s fellow fliers. “We were all solemn and silent,” McClure recalled, “hoping he would come thru.”
Chen got a lead on some sulfathiazole, which White encouraged him to pursue. That Sunday, May 10, $410 worth of the drug arrived, the answer to White’s prayers. He started Lawson on the drug immediately, then removed the stiches from his leg. The stump had healed, but still showed some signs of infection. “Lawson’s temperature normal for the first time!” White wrote in his diary the next day. “Seems on the mend.”
White helped him out of bed twice and let the pilot rest in a chair. Lawson continued to improve, so much so that a week after his surgery he could drink milk, which the Chinese had boiled, poured into a bottle, and lowered into a well to cool. He followed that with strained soup and mush. A local carpenter made him crutches.
White busied himself filling teeth and doing eye exams. “Had three more dentistry patients and three eye patients!” he exclaimed in his diary. “Opthalmoscopy and retinoscopy by candlelight!” He even had time to whittle a dagger and buy stamps for his collection, while the locals presented each raider with a cane inscribed, “A keepsake to the officers of our friends and allies of the American Air Force.” “Whatever people can say about the unsanitary conditions, etc., of the Chinese, no one can ever complain about their hospitality,” White wrote in his diary. “They are great people.”
The other airmen found ways to keep busy as Lawson healed. Through Davy Jones the men learned that most of the raiders had survived, and other news came over the hospital’s radio, which could pick up station KGEI in San Francisco. McClure cheered the success of his beloved St. Louis Cardinals, who would go on to beat the New York Yankees that summer in the World Series, while all the men rejoiced at the news of the American Navy’s victory over the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea. “We whooped and yelled like Indians when we got the score on that one,” McClure later wrote. “Any time we could hear of bad fortune for the Japs the day was a success.”
Japanese bombers droned overhead daily, en route to attack other towns, a constant reminder of the enemy’s advance. White knew time was running short and began to make preparations to press on to Chuchow. The locals threw a farewell feast for the raiders, complete with nine courses and five extras that began with roast watermelon seeds, followed by buffalo, pork, and even shark fins. “It looked like white rubber,” McClure recalled of the delicacy, “and tasted the same.”
The Japanese onslaught continued; the airmen were out of time. “News not so good. The army and the banks have already left town!” White wrote in his diary on May 17. “Have to leave tomorrow, rain or shine.”
The men woke early on the morning of the eighteenth to find it cold and rainy. Exactly one month had passed since the raid on Tokyo. White dressed Lawson’s stump, while others helped him into a pair of trousers, the left pant leg pinned up. The aviators then climbed into sedan chairs, pulling oilcloths over them to keep dry
“I want to show you something,” Chen said to Lawson.
The porters carried the airman around the hospital and set his chair down alongside a wooden coffin. “It was a new one, made by the same Chinese carpenter who had made my crutches,” Lawson wrote. “It was to have been mine.”
The airmen set off in the rain, accompanied by the Smith family, Chen, porters, and armed escorts. “We crossed the pontoon bridge over the river and headed up the valley,” White wrote. “We followed the river, crossing and recrossing its stream many times, sometimes on bridges, more often by ferries—small boats poled by coolies or towed across by ropes. The countryside was lovely and green and as the day progressed it slowly cleared and we dried out.”
The men broke for lunch at 2 p.m. and then set out again. “Many of the hills along the way had beautiful old pagodas on them,” White recalled. “New patches of rice seedlings looked like rich lawns. Occasionally we would pass through a small grove of young pine trees. It was very interesting and beautiful country.”
The aviators stopped that night at the Smiths’ house. White redressed Lawson’s leg and sent a cable to Chungking. “En route Chushien with four injured officers,” he wired. “ETA 22 May. Request plane meet us.”
The Smiths remained behind as the aviators set out again the next morning, despite protests from the fliers to evacuate. “The spirit and pluck of these people,” White wrote, “never ceased to amaze me.”
“See you in Chungking,” Mrs. Smith said.
The Japanese advance forced the aviators to hurry; traveling the next several days in rickshaws and sedan chairs, winding past rivers and through the mountains. “It seemed to me,” Lawson said, “that I could feel the very breath of the Japanese on my neck.”
The hospitality at each stop was grand, including Boy Scouts who awaited them at one village with banners that read, “Welcome to American Air Heroes.”
White’s winded rickshaw driver often fell behind the others, prompting his fellow fliers to shout, “Shift him into high-blower!”
“It’s no use,” the doctor replied. “He’s conked out. I’ve got to hit the silk!”
Transportation improved as the men reached more populated areas, allowing them to trade in the rickshaws and sedan chairs for a 1941 Ford station wagon, complete with bullet holes from a Japanese strafing. “One had evidently went through the windshield and gone through the back of the driver’s seat,” White wrote. “It had been neatly patched but it gave us something to think about!”
Most of the raiders piled into the station wagon, but White loaded Lawson into the back of a charcoal-burning truck, believing the injured pilot would be more comfortable stretched atop three blankets. The vehicles traveled only at night, so as to avoid air attacks by Japanese planes. “Every time we’d hit a bump, and we must have hit a million, I’d leave the floor. The next bump would get me coming down,” Lawson later wrote. “I used both my hands to keep what was left of my leg from banging. That didn’t help much. It just thumped and bled and throbbed.”
The station wagon in contrast proved a smooth ride. “It was a real luxury,” White recalled, “to lean back on the leather cushions and whiz down the road at ten to twenty times the speed at which we had traveled for the previous five days!”
The aviators could hear explosions in the distance behind them. Lawson asked Chen, who rode with him in the truck, what they were.
“Japanese too close,” he replied. “So Chinese blow up road behind us, just after we pass.”
The men arrived in Lishui the night of May 21 at one of the airfields the raiders had tried to reach the night of the raid. The Chinese had been forced to blow up the field to keep the Japanese from seizing it. No plane would come for them now. The fliers turned in, but awoke at 3 a.m. to the news that Japanese forces were bringing mechanized gear over the same roads the Chinese had just destroyed.
White dressed Lawson’s stump, and the raiders set out a little after 4 a.m. in a small camphor-burning bus with a driver whose love of the horn soon earned him the nickname Johnny Beep-beep. “The bus’s brakes were only third in importance in his mind. The horn was first and the steering wheel second,” Lawson recalled. “He was the damndest driver I ever saw. Nothing bothered him, including our yells.”
They stopped that night, May 22, at a local mission. Lawson was too exhausted to participate much in the feast and soon went to bed, wondering aloud why he found the same overpowering smell everywhere he slept.
“It must be some sort of national disinfectant the Chinese use,” he told himself.
White administered a dose of morphine to ease his pain and only then could Lawson bring himself to admit the truth about the stench. “It was my leg, not disinfectant,” he later wrote. “I had been trying to kid myself.”
The men reached Nancheng about 2 a.m. on May 24, only to learn the airfield there had also been destroyed. “We had talked of little else for two days except getting the plane there,” Lawson wrote. “Now it would have to be Kian.” They took small consolation in the fact that the Nancheng headquarters at least could offer them iodine, a precious commodity that none of the fliers had seen in the five weeks since the crash. “All of us were welted and sore with bedbugs and lice,” Lawson recalled. “I still had the bed sores on my back. Doc dabbed all of us from head to foot.”
They slept late the next morning and enjoyed a much-needed day of rest. White wrote a few letters, and Clever’s battered face had healed enough that the bombardier attempted to shave. “It was his first crack at a straight edge but he made out all right,” White observed. “At least he didn’t cut his throat.”
At about six the following morning the fliers set out in another Ford station wagon, arriving twelve hours later at an American Volunteer Group hostel. The Flying Tigers had moved on from Kian, leaving behind a radioman and a few Chinese employees. The news was the same as before. “There was no plane. The field was gone,” Lawson recalled. “We were numb with disappointment.”
They had no choice but to press on to Heng-yang, picking up an overnight train bound for Kweilin, where the fliers settled into an American Volunteer Group hostel. Lawson continued to suffer. “It was a battle to keep from giving him morphine,” White recalled. “There are times when a doctor must be cruel in order to be kind. So I had to let him suffer quite a bit of pain to keep from making an addict out of him.”
The days ticked past as the fliers awaited a plane to fly them out. Lawson had suffered a brutal six weeks. He had survived a violent crash in the surf, endured a battle with gangrene, and the primitive amputation of his left leg. His personal agony was incalculable, but now, after forty-six days, rescue was finally at hand. On June 3 a DC-3 with U.S. Army Air Forces markings appeared in the skies overhead. The raiders erupted in cheers. The airfield was a few miles away, and the hostel’s jeep was already down there. Half an hour later the airmen heard the drone of the vehicle’s engine and looked up to see their fellow raiders Edgar McElroy and Davy Jones, the latter armed with a medical kit. “I knew I’d start crying as soon as I heard Davy’s voice,” Lawson wrote, “and damned if I didn’t.”