I was beaten, kicked and pummeled pretty regularly by the Japanese and systematically starved every day.
—GEORGE BARR, MAY 12, 1946
THE CREWMEN OF THE Green Hornet were not so lucky. The plane carrying Chase Nielsen, Dean Hallmark, and Bob Meder touched down in Tokyo at 7 p.m. on April 25. Guards ushered the men into cars, and after an hourlong ride the fliers arrived at the headquarters of the gendarmerie, whose brutal reputation was best described in a 1942 intelligence report. “The gendarmerie is the worst element in the Japanese Armed Forces,” the report stated. “They have no respect for man, woman or child. Gambling, narcotics, kidnappings, deliberate murder, prostitution, graft of all kinds and terrible torture are all in the day’s work. They will even deliberately kill their own nationals to create an incident if this is the only excuse they can find to obtain the end they desire.”
Once inside, guards removed Nielsen’s blindfold, exposing to him a bare room that contained only a table and three chairs. He was joined by an unarmed Japanese civilian. Nielsen was still handcuffed, but a guard stood by the doors. The civilian told him his name was Ohara and that he was a graduate of Columbia University.
“But Ohara is an Irish name,” Nielsen said.
“I realize that,” he answered. “But it is still my name.”
Nielsen guessed the short-statured Ohara was in his late twenties and appeared confident to the point of cockiness. He started to rattle on about baseball, talking about how much the Japanese worshipped Babe Ruth. The interrogator then changed topics. “I suppose you know Tokyo was bombed last week?”
“It was?” Nielsen replied, feigning surprise. “Who did it?”
Ohara chatted again about sports, but this time Nielsen interrupted him. “What do you think about President Roosevelt?”
“I’d like to hit him in the face with a rotten tomato,” Ohara barked.
“You can say that now that you’re back in Tokyo,” Nielsen said with a smile.
Ohara assured Nielsen he would not be mistreated. “You can play baseball and golf and enjoy the hot baths of Japan.”
Nielsen would soon learn how far from the truth that assurance was.
The door opened, and a Japanese officer with short hair entered. Ohara left, replaced by a short baldheaded interpreter who Nielsen estimated was in his midsixties. He told Nielsen and the other airmen he had graduated from Stanford University and spent thirty-five years in Sacramento, working as a lawyer for Japanese farmers along the West Coast. Nielsen would spend a lot of time with the interpreter, who began every sentence with a stock answer. “Well, well,” he would always say, “we’ll have to see about that.” Nielsen and the others soon nicknamed him Well-Well.
“I made a fortune,” Well-Well said, “and came back to Japan to retire, but they cleaned me out and here I am.”
The questioning began again. Where did Nielsen come from? Had he bombed Tokyo? Was he stationed in China or the Philippines?
The interrogation by three guards, two reporters, and the interpreter dragged on until about 4 a.m. as the Japanese alternatively slapped and kicked the American aviator, whose legs were tied and hands bound behind the chair. The abuse reopened the wounds on his shins, causing blood to run down his legs.
Guards finally hauled the exhausted airman back to his cell, a cubby barely four feet wide and eight feet deep with a latrine in the corner. Nielsen collapsed atop the grass mat with several blankets and slept until 7 a.m., when guards brought him a breakfast of watery rice and a cup of miso soup.
The interrogation began again right after breakfast, but Nielsen refused to offer more than his name, rank, and serial number. “We didn’t get the brutal treatment we’d received right after we were captured,” the navigator later wrote. “A more subtle form of torture began at Tokyo—the endless days and nights of solitary confinement in stinking, filthy cells with just enough food to keep us alive.”
The other airmen suffered the same. “The first two weeks, it seemed like they interrogated us about twenty-four hours a day,” Bobby Hite recalled. “They would run us in and out of the cell and we didn’t know if it was night or day, really. The main thing they seemed to want to know was, where in the world did we come from?”
The interrogator’s intent was to wear down the aviators—and as one boasted to navigator George Barr, “Japanese method scientee-fic.”
The scientific method, the red-haired New Yorker discovered, was a sucker punch; one such hit would cost him most of his hearing in his right ear.
The Japanese likewise walloped Nielsen on the back with a black rubber hose, prompting him to ask one day about the unusual choice of weapon.
“Hose don’t make marks,” the interrogator responded.
“Well,” the bombardier thought, “what difference does it make if you’re going to kill us whether we’ve got marks on us or what?”
The airmen were often shocked by how much the Japanese knew, prompting Barr to wonder, “Is it chance or is their espionage better than we had suspected?”
Jacob DeShazer recalled one such experience that floored him.
“You were the bombardier,” one of the interrogators pressed him. “You know all about the Norden bombsight. We want you to draw us a picture of that Norden bombsight. Put the knobs on and show us how it’s built.”
“You know,” DeShazer replied. “I’m one of the worst persons. I can’t draw anything, even a house.”
“You can surely draw a picture of an airplane.”
DeShazer sketched an intentionally terrible picture. “That’s an airplane,” he said. “That’s about the best I can do.”
The interrogators weren’t dissuaded. “You should be able to make some kind of picture of that bombsight.”
Then to DeShazer’s surprise one of the interrogators picked up a pencil and drew the bombsight. “It was just perfect,” the bombardier recalled. “I could tell there wasn’t a thing out of order.”
“Is that a Norden bombsight?” the interrogator asked.
DeShazer felt there was no use denying; the Japanese clearly had nailed it. “It sure is,” he confessed.
The long days of interrogation and abuse coupled with endless hours of solitary confinement wore down the aviators. The Japanese forced them to wear leg irons with just a few inches of chain that hobbled the airmen at all times, even in their cells. “Sanitation facilities were worse than primitive,” Nielsen said. “There was no water in the cell. The toilet was a hole in one corner. I tried to get permission to wash my hands and face and teeth and ‘Well-Well’ said he’d see about it, but nothing happened.”
The only reprieve came from a few curious guards who attempted to chat with the airmen in broken English, mostly asking about American actors such as Gary Cooper, Dorothy Lamour, and Jean Arthur. The airmen welcomed even that scant interaction. “Nothing is the hardest thing in the world to do,” Nielsen later wrote. “I just sat in my cell—no exercise, nothing to read, no radio, no nothing.”
Others agreed. “We had just come out of a full American life with all kinds of goodies,” Hite recalled, “good food, good life, and suddenly we were in a solitary cell and were being harassed, slapped, and kicked. Our rations were meager, and we just wondered if the world was going to hold together.”
Well-Well pestered the captives. “You can’t smoke or drink now,” he told Nielsen. “So you will lose all of your bad American habits.”
Nielsen fired back: who said those were bad habits?
Well-Well just grinned.
The Japanese had managed to locate at least one of the downed bombers, salvaging maps and charts that interrogators laid out before the captured fliers. Nielsen spotted stationery with the aircraft carrier’s crest and name. His heart sank.
“What’s a Hornet?” the interrogator asked.
Nielsen attempted to explain that it was a bee that stung, but the Japanese officer didn’t buy it. Instead the interrogator produced a crew list of each plane and pointed to Doolittle’s name at the top. “Do you know him?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we captured him several days ago,” he said. “We killed him.”
“Oh.”
The interrogator ran his finger down the list until he hit crew six. He stopped beside Nielsen’s name. “I know you know this guy,” he said.
“Yes,” Nielsen admitted.
“Your friend, George Barr, the red-haired guy,” the interrogator continued. “He told us all about it.”
“Oh, he did?” Nielsen said, though he didn’t believe it. “Why don’t you tell me, and then I’ll tell you whether he is right or not?”
“Oh, no, you tell us.”
Nielsen felt it was futile. The airman had resisted for weeks, but he believed there was no point in holding out any longer; to do so invited only more beatings, abuse, and agony, particularly now that the Japanese had found some of the mission’s most vital records. “We confessed to bombing Tokyo, told them the areas we had bombed and confessed of leaving an aircraft carrier,” Nielsen said. “Other than that, a small sketch of our life’s history—where we went to school, where we had our army training, that was all it consisted of.”
The Japanese prepared statements allegedly based on the confessions and then read them back to the aviators, who never saw actual English translations. Nielsen recalled that his statement as read to him noted only that he had bombed steel mills; there was no mention of targeting civilians or schools and churches. The others recalled similar statements. The Japanese demanded the men sign them, each one dated May 22. Nielsen refused, but after the Japanese threatened him, decided it wasn’t worth a fight.
The airmen’s confessions proved far different from the ones the Japanese claimed the men made. Excerpts of the alleged statements that the gendarmerie forwarded to General Hajime Sugiyama proved so outlandish and contradictory as to be almost unbelievable. On the one hand, they painted the raiders as incompetent cowards, so terrified of Japan’s powerful fighters that they dropped bombs on any target and fled. This was intended, no doubt, to cover up the incredible defense failures that had allowed sixteen bombers to penetrate the homeland, pummel the capital, and escape unmolested. On the other hand, the alleged confessions portrayed the airmen as bloodthirsty marauders who wanted to kill women and children, statements Japan could use against them in future criminal proceedings as well as in the court of world opinion.
“What were your feelings when bombing Nagoya?” an interrogator asked Hite, according to excerpts of his alleged statement.
“I thought it natural to drop bombs without locating the targets, destroying civilian houses and wounding civilians. I thought that this was one of the objectives of guerrilla warfare,” the Texan supposedly answered, characterizing America’s tactics with the same language the Japanese government had used in the press to describe previous carrier raids. “While bombing I was filled with feelings of fear and thought it would be much more prudent to drop the bombs anywhere as quickly as possible and flee. At that time I thought it was too much for me to bomb accurately.”
“Did you fire your guns while fleeing from Nagoya?” the interrogator continued.
“I did not mention this point before today but, honestly speaking, five or six minutes after we left the city, we saw a place that looked like a primary school and saw many children playing,” he allegedly said. “The pilot lowered the altitude of the plane rapidly and ordered the gunner to get prepared. When the plane was in the oblique position, the pilot ordered us to fire; therefore, we fired at once.”
Billy Farrow’s supposed confession echoed Hite’s.
“Although you say that you aimed at military installations, in reality you injured innocent civilians?” the interrogator asked.
“I’m sorry about that,” Farrow supposedly answered. “We are only temporary personnel and did not receive full training, so we cannot be sure of hitting the target. Moreover, at the time the Japanese Army was firing anti-aircraft guns at us so all I cared for was to drop the bombs as quickly as possible and go. This is why homes were destroyed and civilians were killed.”
“You fired at the children in the primary school on your way out to the sea after leaving the city of Nagoya, didn’t you?”
“Really, I’m sorry about that,” the South Carolinian repeated. “There was a place which looked like a school, with many people there. As a parting shot, with a feeling of ‘damn these Japs,’ I made a power dive and carried out some strafing. There was absolutely no defensive fire from below.”
The Japanese likewise cast Harold Spatz as a gunner bent on revenge. “I aimed at the children in the school yard and strafed,” he supposedly said. “My personal feeling at that time was to feed these ‘Japs’ their own medicine.”
The raid had in fact killed civilians and some children, which the Japanese used as a political weapon. Just as Roosevelt had capitalized on the mission’s success to help bolster American morale, the Japanese used the attack to outrage and unite the rattled public. The bogus confessions served as the perfect tool to ignite that fury—and set the stage for a trial that could land the captured airmen in front of a firing squad.
Although many of the bogus confessions incriminated the aviators, the Japanese used others to tar senior American leaders, particularly Doolittle—the nation’s new hero. That was the case with Jacob DeShazer’s confession. “We thought that it would be permissible to drop the bombs as rapidly as possible, killing, injuring, and confusing as many as possible,” the bombardier said. “Col. Doolittle and other senior officers, and of course, the pilot, too, did not give us any special precautions. Of course, the original target was the oil tanks; though the civilian homes around the tanks were also sought.”
Bob Meder’s confession went even further, not only blaming Doolittle but also pointing out that this savage new form of warfare was how America fought. How else could the United States weaken Japanese resolve?
“You bombed many homes of civilians and killed many of them, besides hitting the factories; what do you think about that?”
“We didn’t mind their casualties too much because Col. Doolittle, in his order, did not specially caution us to avoid bombing them.”
“Don’t you even feel sorry about injuring innocent women and children?”
“As an individual, I personally feel sorry, but I think that it is inevitable in modern warfare. We cannot help but ignore such conditions because demoralization of the people achieves one of our objectives.”
ONE OF THE OBJECTIVES of William Standley, America’s ambassador to Russia, was to sort out the diplomatic mess caused by Ski York and his crew. Standley had been shocked by the news that one of Doolittle’s crews had landed in Vladivostok—information the Russian government failed to disclose for three days. The first report the ambassador had received was that the Russians planned to intern the raiders near Khabarovsk, a decision made without consultation with the American authorities—just as the crew had suspected.
A four-star admiral who had served as chief of naval operations from 1933 to 1937, Standley had arrived in Russia to begin his ambassadorship barely two weeks earlier. He sat down for his first meeting at the Kremlin with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin two days later, on April 23, a meeting that touched on the fate of the raiders.
“Of course, Mr. Ambassador, they should not have landed on Soviet territory,” Stalin said. “We’ll have to intern them in accordance with International Law.”
To Standley’s relief, Stalin displayed “no annoyance” over the matter and “regretted” the need to intern the crew. The Soviet leader said the airmen were safe and would be well cared for in Russia, adding that the pilot claimed to have run out of fuel and been forced to divert. Standley told him that the other bombers had flown to China as ordered and that this one must have been unable reach Chinese territory.
The United States still hoped to smuggle the aviators out—a plan that involved assigning them to the embassy as assistant military attachés—since so far only the Russian and American governments knew of the bomber’s diversion. That hope was dashed the following day in a press conference in Kuibyshev, Russia’s wartime capital, located on the banks of the Volga River some five hundred miles east of Moscow.
“What would happen if an American plane was forced to land on Soviet territory after bombing Japan?” an American reporter had asked.
The question floored Solomon Lozovsky, head of the Soviet Information Bureau, who knew Japanese correspondents were present. “There’s no use talking about something which may never happen,” he stammered.
The Russians feared the ruse was up. Afraid of possible Japanese retaliation, Russia opted to release the news, blaming America afterward for the leak. Standley was embarrassed. “Look, fellows,” he told reporters. “I’ve really nothing for you. The Soviet Government acted in the only way they could, once the news was out.”
Standley sat down on the evening of April 25 with Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who complained that the bomber’s diversion to Russia had only complicated relations with Japan. Standley told him that General Marshall expressed appreciation for the courtesy Russia had extended to the crew and assured them that the landing was “wholly unintentional.” “After thanking me for this message Molotov asked me to request my Government to take adequate steps to prevent such landings in the future,” the ambassador wrote in his report of the meeting. “I stated that I felt sure that my Government had already issued such instructions.”
Standley followed up with a personal note to Molotov, requesting permission for an American representative to visit the interned airmen. The Russian foreign minister responded on April 27, “stating in effect that since the crew was being transferred to a region nearer the center of the USSR the visit could not be made at the present time; that upon the arrival of the crew at the new place of residence I would be advised when and where my representative might visit the crew.”
The possibility of a visit with the crew excited officials at the War Department, where analysts were busy sifting through Japanese propaganda broadcasts to decipher important details of the raid. Secretary of State Hull fired off a telegram to Standley with eight questions the War Department wanted answered. Those included the route flown as well as details on the enemy opposition encountered, from fighters and barrage balloons to antiaircraft fire. The department further requested specifics on the targets attacked and the results as well as on the measures Japan took to camouflage its factories and industries. “Of course, information regarding the welfare and living conditions of the crew and their treatment is desired,” the message concluded. “It might also be possible to take from them messages for relatives and friends in the United States.”
American officials weren’t the only ones interested in the crew. Of the eighty airmen who had participated in the raid, Japan had managed to capture just eight. York’s crew represented a chance to increase that number. The ambassador to Russia, Naotake Sato, a career diplomat and former Japanese foreign minister, threatened his Soviet counterparts, according to American intelligence intercepts. “If the Soviet merely intern American aircraft which lands in Maritime provinces after raiding Japan, they will, in effect, be providing Americans with a base, inconsistent with the neutrality treaty and dangerous to Soviet-Japanese relationship,” Sato argued. “If the incident were repeated on a large scale Japan could not accept responsibility for consequences.” Further instructions from Tokyo days later told Sato to make clear that it was not all right for Russia to “merely intern the planes and crews.”
Russia refused to be bullied, arguing that internment was in line with international law and therefore did not violate the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact. Though Russia would “endeavor to avoid” any misunderstandings, officials emphasized that Japan needed to back off. “Whatever steps are taken the Soviet government is to decide,” Russia countered on April 30. “Any criticisms of the steps we take must be made on the principle of friendly nations. Any act contravening this principle is to be condemned. No complaints should be made unless made in a friendly spirit.”
Tokyo ordered Sato to again press the issue. “If the United States sees that the Soviet winks at this sort of mischief, the United States will keep doing it on a larger scale. Therefore, it is essential to stop it before it starts,” Tokyo instructed Sato to argue. “The United States cannot bomb Japan unless she does so from someone else’s territory.” Then there was the matter of York’s bomber. “Since the other planes which escaped headed for Central China, it is evident that this lone plane fled intentionally in the direction it took,” Tokyo warned. “One more occurrence will necessitate measures on our part and have a tremendous influence on our mutual relations.”
Despite Japan’s threats, its pressure was limited. While Russia was bogged down in the west against Germany—and reluctant to open a second front in the east—Japan likewise could not risk another fight so close to home. If war broke out between Japan and Russia, America would no doubt flood the latter with bombers that would then day after day pound Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, forcing Japan to recall its forces to defend the homeland. Sato understood this reality and on May 7 cautioned his superiors to back down: was the fate of this one bomber crew worth another war? “I advise that we discard all small feelings against the Soviet Union and work towards a softening of feelings,” Sato wrote. “Basically, the main idea is for us to take a friendly attitude toward the Soviet Union and make them become less watchful of us and eventually to draw them toward us.”
Against the backdrop of these contentious negotiations, Russia relocated York and his crew in late April. Guards at the dacha in Khabarovsk ushered the airmen into several cars around 10 p.m. and drove for half an hour, stopping alongside a single railcar parked at a siding outside of the city. The raiders climbed aboard to find an aisle on one side with compartments along the other. The dim glow of candles—shielded from the outside by blackout curtains—illuminated primitive compartments that featured little more than wooden benches without cushions and no floor carpeting. Overhead racks held rolled-up straw mattresses, and the smell of dirt hung in the air. “It didn’t take us long,” Emmens recalled, “to figure that we were going to be sitting on those hard benches in the daytime and at night we would be sprawled on those straw mattresses.”
Crews outside loaded the car with loaves of black bread, three-foot bolognas, tins of caviar, and cases of vodka—all of which the airmen realized pointed to a long trip. A train engine soon arrived and attached to the railcar, pulling it to a nearby station to link it up with a longer train. About midnight the train set out west for what turned out to be a twenty-one-day journey along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The scenery at times was beautiful as the train rolled through forests and alongside rivers. Some days the conductor pulled onto sidings to allow other trains to pass, including many loaded down with troops headed to fight the Germans. Unlike the raiders, who traveled in compartments, Russian forces crammed into boxcars without bunks and only straw to cover the floor. Horses and men occasionally even crowded together.
The poverty amazed the fliers; everyone seemed to be dressed in rags. Beggars crowded around the windows in train stations, pleading for bread crusts. “The children were the most impressive,” Emmens wrote. “Bands of them dressed in absolute tatters, no shoes, and covered with filth—completely black, some of them—roved the railroad station area and begged for food.” A scene in Omsk particularly troubled the pilot. “One of the children had nothing on but a piece of dirty cloth with a hole cut in it for his head,” Emmens wrote. “It had no bottom and no sleeves. The lower half of him was as naked as the day he was born. His stomach, like those of 80 per cent of the children we saw, protruded from lack not only of proper food, but of any kind of food.”
After seventeen days the train neared Kuibyshev, Russia’s wartime capital and home to all the foreign embassies.
“I think your people will be expecting you,” Mike, the translator-guard, announced.
The news thrilled the airmen, who after a month in Russia, had yet to see anyone from the American embassy or consulate. The night before the train arrived, they hustled to get ready. “We shined our brass. We made a list of things we were running out of. We needed toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, shaving cream, and lotion. And we would ask for some cigarettes,” Emmens later wrote. “And, of course, we would give them messages to send home to our families saying that we were okay.”
The train pulled into the station at 5:30 a.m. Mike locked the airmen in the compartments and departed with a final request from them to contact the embassy and make sure American officials knew they were there. The airmen waited anxiously. An hour passed, then two; morning turned into afternoon. The fliers grew glum. Mike and the other guards arrived back at dusk, smelling of soap and vodka, having spent the day bathing and drinking, as opposed to tracking down diplomats. “Not one word did we hear from the American Embassy,” Emmens recalled, “nothing.”
The train pulled out of the station that evening, once again chugging west. A few days later, on May 19, it reached Okhuna, a small village about ten miles from Penza. A half dozen Soviet officers welcomed the fliers, ushering them into waiting cars for a twenty-minute ride through an area with no paved streets or sidewalks. “The same sad and bitter-looking people were trudging slowly along the paths,” Emmens recalled. “Again, only rags constituted their clothing.”
The cars rolled up to the compound, which was surrounded by a tall wooden fence and guarded by a gate. Inside the men found three buildings, including a guesthouse where York settled alone in one bedroom, while the others paired off into shared quarters. The rooms offered clothes racks along with iron cots and kapok-filled mattresses. Despite the coarse sheets and blankets, the men considered the quarters comfortable.
“Well, here we are!” Emmens announced to his roommate, Nolan Herndon.
“Yeah,” Herndon replied, “where?”