For victory, the black heart of Japan must be bombed again and again.
—PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, APRIL 22, 1943
SKI YORK AND HIS CREW traveled almost a week by train, followed by several more days in a flat-bottomed ferry boat on the Kama River, before finally disembarking at the village of Okhansk, located at the foot of the Ural Mountains. Poverty was rampant in this communal farm village. “There was no pavement in the town at all,” Emmens recalled. “Everything was just dirt and these almost hovels.”
The raiders settled into a primitive home—albeit one with a fresh coat of paint—that boasted a kitchen, a dining room, a bedroom for York and Emmens to share, and another for Ted Laban and David Pohl. Nolan Herndon would have to sleep on a bed in the small hall. The single bathroom consisted of a hole in the floor that emptied out under the home. “The odor,” Emmens later wrote, “can be imagined.”
The Russians measured the airmen for winter clothes. After the first week, a bundle of forty letters arrived. York counted thirteen and Emmens ten, while the others split up the rest. “I will never forget the thrill of receiving news from home,” Emmens recalled. “Both Ski and I received pictures from home of our new offspring.”
“I wonder how old our kids will be when we get out of this place?” Emmens asked.
“Jesus,” York answered, “I wonder.”
Hope seemed to arrive when Major General Follett Bradley, who was in Russia on a mission from Roosevelt to speed up the delivery of lend-lease supplies, visited the crew. Joined by Ambassador Joseph Standley and recently promoted Brigadier General Michela, the three departed Kuibyshev the afternoon of September 11, flying in a twin-engine Douglas transport to Molotov. There the Americans boarded the provincial governor’s yacht, a side-wheel riverboat. “The countryside was even more beautiful from the steamer than it had been from the air, the foothills of the Ural mountains rising gently from the river, forested with deciduous trees flaming with the gorgeous colors of Autumn,” Standley wrote. “Turbulent mountain streams tumbled down the hills, so crystal clear and beautiful that I longed for a chance to wet a fly in one of them.”
The American officials disembarked the next day at Okhansk. The raiders watched from the top of the riverbank, marveling at the governor’s yacht.
“Boy,” York said, “that’s not exactly consistent with the communism this country preaches, is it?”
The ambassador caught sight of the anxious airmen. “I saw a little group of men in American khaki uniforms at the top of the bluff,” Standley later wrote. “They waved excitedly and we waved back.”
The raiders saluted the senior officers on arrival, and the group made introductions of everyone and shook hands.
“Wonderful country,” Standley said, trying to make conversation.
“Yes, sir,” York replied, “except when you are stuck in it.”
Everyone laughed.
The group returned to the house. The primitive conditions surprised Standley, who described the home as resembling a “log cabin.” The Americans sat down at the dining room table. “Not exactly like home,” the ambassador said, “is it?”
York asked about the war, and Bradley gave the men a brief update. “What news do you have of the rest of our gang from the Tokyo raid?” Emmens asked.
“The raid made quite an impression back home,” Bradley said.
York mentioned that Japanese reports broadcast in Russia claimed the loss of as many as seven bombers.
“None of the ships was lost over Japan itself,” Bradley said. “Some of them did have trouble when they got to China. In fact, I think the Japs got one or two of the crews, but I don’t think any of them was shot down.”
One of the Russians brought in a box of supplies for the raiders, including more magazines, toothpaste, and a Russian grammar book that the fliers had requested. “It’s not much,” Michela said, “just a couple of shirts and some toothpaste sample tubes.”
The airmen appreciated the supplies and asked for the possibility of getting some new clothes and shoes. Michela instructed them to write down their sizes.
“Have they been feeding you well?” Standley asked.
“No, sir,” York replied. “They have not! We have been living on rice and cabbage and black bread and tea until the word came of your visit. All that food that you see was brought in last night for your benefit.”
The American diplomats were appalled, but powerless to do much to help—and the raiders knew it. “I felt a tremendous letdown creeping over me, and I think the other boys felt it too. Here were our own countrymen, the only people in Russia who could do anything for us, but their hands were tied,” Emmens wrote. “They had no more chance of getting the Russians to do something for us than we did.”
Standley had to balance bigger concerns and carefully chose his battles. These were just five fliers out of what one day might be thousands who would land on Soviet soil. The ambassador couldn’t push the Russians too far. “I felt terribly sorry for the boys, but, after all, like the rest of us, they were caught up in the maw of a vast war which might go on for years,” he later wrote. “I wanted to help them and to establish a procedure for all the others who would land in Russian territory as the home islands of the Japanese came within the bomber line of our advancing forces.”
York leaned across the table toward Michela.
“General, we are having a rather bad time. This enforced idleness is not good,” he said. “If nothing has happened by the time the spring thaws come, I’m afraid we are going to have to try getting out on our own, even from up here. In that event, is there anything you can do for us? We would need maps and a compass.”
Michela said he suspected the raiders might be planning an escape, but cautioned that the embassy could not help. “I don’t blame you for feeling that way, but you can imagine what would happen if the embassy were caught aiding you.”
“You would all be taking pretty much of a chance trying anything like that,” Standley added.
Bradley intervened, informing the raiders that he was trying to arrange a route to ship lend-lease bombers to Russia via Alaska. “If I am successful, it just might be worked out that you could all be absorbed into the crew setup of Americans who will be flying airplanes into Russia,” the general said, warning the men not to get too excited. “On the other hand, if these people want to keep you here in the Soviet Union, there is nothing I can do, you can do, or anybody else can do about it to change their minds.”
York said the news was encouraging. “You must all try not to lose your powers of reason. You must remember that, after all, there is a war being fought, a big war, and it will last a long time,” Bradley added. “You are five Americans up here in Siberia. Your getting out or staying here will not change the course of that war.”
The general then produced a carton of smokes from his briefcase. “Oh, boy, American cigarettes!” York exclaimed. “We’ll have to really ration these.”
The raiders passed along lists of desired supplies and letters for the embassy to mail and then accompanied the ambassador and generals down to the dock. “I felt as if we were saying good-by to our only hopes of leaving, our only connection with the outside world,” Emmens wrote. “Actually, we were!”
Standley would note in his report to Secretary of State Hull that he found the raiders in “good health, comfortably housed, adequately fed and in general well taken care of,” but the ambassador empathized with the airmen’s frustration. “I knew how the men felt,” he later wrote. “I tried to cheer the boys up as best I could without arousing false hope. They were still standing on the ferry barge looking after us and waving, as the little yacht rounded the first bend in the Kama River.”
SEPTEMBER GAVE WAY TO October and then November. The weather grew cold and wet as the village’s dirt roads first turned to mud and then froze. By October a foot of snow blanketed the area, and large pieces of ice floated down the Kama, a brief prelude before the entire river froze, making river passage impossible until spring. Unaccustomed to such brutal cold, the raiders remained mostly indoors. “Our morale was becoming lower day by day,” Emmens wrote. “It was becoming necessary to be extremely careful of the things we said and the manner in which we said them to one another. Any serious rift among ourselves would be bad, in our close quarters.”
As the group’s leader, York enforced discipline, insisting that his men use formalities such as “yes, sir” and “no, sir.” Though he was best friends with Emmens, he likewise required the junior officer do the same in front of the others, though in private the two used each other’s nicknames. “I knew we had to maintain discipline,” York later said. “Instead of coming out like a bunch of bums, we would come out like a bunch of troops.” The raiders split firewood outdoors and studied Russian, chuckling over the grammar book’s propagandist sentences, such as “In America, the workers are poorly fed, poorly clothed, and are generally mistreated by the ruling class.” “I spent about ten hours a day studying Russian,” York recalled. “I figured this would probably be the only chance in the world where I would want to learn the language, but as long as I had to be there, I was going to come out with something.”
The raiders played hearts each night after dinner until the evening news came on at midnight, devising a system to reward the winner as well as solve petty grievances. “The heaviest loser had to put his head down in the seat on the divan with his bottom toward the center of the room,” Emmens later wrote. “Each of the other players was allowed to render him one swat on the stern with an open hand. The swat could be helped by a running start from the opposite wall. The second loser received similar treatment from the remaining three, the third loser from the remaining two, the fourth loser from the winner only, and the winner suffered only a sore hand. This offered some vent to ill feeling which any of us might build up during the week.”
In late November, assistant military attaché Major Robert McCabe and naval physician Commander Frederick Lang visited the crew, arriving by horse-drawn sleigh with magazines, books, and several bottles of American whiskey.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Lang announced.
“By God,” Emmens said, “it is the cocktail hour, isn’t it?”
The raiders retrieved glasses from the kitchen and ice from an outside fence post and settled in for an afternoon and evening of heavy drinking that lasted until 2 a.m. Lang gave each raider a physical the next day, calling them all together afterward. “I see some indications of pellagra and scurvy in all of you,” he told the men. “It is caused by improper diet. The serum and the pills should reach here in about ten days. Stop worrying, all of you. Get some exercise and get outdoors as much as you can.”
The embassy cabled McCabe’s report on the raiders to Secretary of State Hull on November 30. “Based on Soviet standards the food, housing and heating conditions are excellent. Winter clothing issued by the Soviets was not adequate but the military commander at Okhansk has promised the immediate issue of better clothing from Molotov. Except for moderate vitamin deficiencies the health of the crew is satisfactory,” McCabe wrote. “Morale is still excellent due to the outstanding leadership displayed by Major York, although continued inactivity, especially during the winter, is causing a decline. The Soviet attitude toward the crew is very friendly.”
McCabe unofficially warned that the continued idleness would prompt the raiders to try to escape, which would create an embarrassing situation. “It would be desirable if some way could be found for the internees to be assigned some useful work. He also states that they have expressed the desire for a transfer to a more southerly climate since all of them are from the southern part of the United States,” the report noted. “It might be possible during some of the conversations which are taking place between American and Soviet military authorities for the American representatives to propose that the internees be released on parole for work with the Soviet Air Force in the Caucasus.”
Heavy black coats arrived a week later, made from reversed goatskin and cheap black dye that would soon leave the raiders ink stained.
“Looks like we’re here for the winter,” Emmens said.
“Was there any doubt in your mind before he brought us this stuff?” York quipped.
One local froze to death on the road near the house as the temperatures dipped below zero. Food grew scarce. The raiders lived off little more than cabbage and black bread, causing York’s weight to drop from 180 pounds to just 135. Nothing was ever wasted, a scene best captured after the locals secured several chickens. “We turned down the heads and the feet, but the women in the kitchen ate the feet and the heads, cracked them open and ate the brains,” Emmens recalled. “They ate so many of the insides of the chicken that I didn’t realize existed—lungs, of course, the gizzard and the liver, little round things that are kidneys, I guess, about as round as the end of your little finger. They made the most of chicken that I have ever seen made.”
The airmen battled lethargy as time seemed to stand still, the days and even weeks blurring together. The fliers would sleep all afternoon yet lie awake at night, struggling to summon enough energy at times even to study or read. In a desperate effort to fight off boredom, the men held a contest to see who could catch the most rats, tormenting the captured rodents for amusement. “We would stake a live one outside in the snow—the things you think of—and tie a piece of thread around its legs so it couldn’t get away and the stake on the ground; give it about 1½ or two feet,” Emmens recalled. “It would scramble around on top of the snow, and a bird or a hawk or something would come down and grab it and take off with it. What else did we do?”
Even these diversions failed to help. “Our spirits had reached an unbelievable depth. It was difficult to realize that we had been in the country as long as we had,” Emmens wrote. “My son would be seven months old on the eighteenth of December. I wondered what he looked like.” Thanksgiving passed with little notice, but the approach of Christmas felt different as homesickness exacerbated the airmen’s daily miseries. “On one of the trips to the forest for wood, we brought back a Christmas tree,” Emmens recalled. “It was a small one, but we decorated it with bits of cotton and put it on the table. Somehow, it helped our morale just a bit.”
Mike, the interpreter, brought a filthy Gypsy woman home, and at night the raiders would listen to him having sex with her in his room, which further eroded morale. “Our gums were bleeding whenever we brushed our teeth. We found that we could even spit blood by just sucking on our gums,” Emmens later wrote. “Our skin was dry and flaky. We were all losing weight. And our morale was pretty well shot.”
Hungry, exhausted, and desperate to escape the frozen wasteland, York proposed writing a letter directly to Stalin.
“Are you serious?” Emmens replied. “What makes you think a letter would even reach him?”
“Maybe it wouldn’t,” York replied. “But it’s like everything else—we won’t know until we try.”
Emmens asked what he planned to tell him.
“Exactly what we think! We’ll tell him we want to get out,” he said. “If he can’t arrange that, we ask him to move us to a warmer climate and to put us to work.”
York soon sat down and started a lengthy letter. “You don’t know about us, of course,” he wrote. “We are a trained combat crew, and we are not doing anybody any good. We could be fighting against our common enemy.” York suggested several possible courses of action, including simply releasing the airmen. After such a long time the release could be done with certain secrecy. If that was not an option, York suggested that the fliers be allowed to fight alongside Russian forces or at a minimum to work in some other capacity that might take advantage of their skills, preferably somewhere warmer. Mike helped the raiders translate the letter.
“I will mail it at once,” he said.
“I think he will too,” York told Emmens, “because I think he would be afraid not to—a letter addressed to Stalin.”
January proved a long and bitter month. “We never stopped hoping to hear from the embassy, that someone was coming, that we might be leaving, that the medicine we had asked for might arrive, that the clothing might arrive—anything,” Emmens wrote. “But nothing came.” By February the days began to warm up to zero degrees. The icy river, long frozen solid, started to break up. The raiders talked openly of escaping that spring, planning which boat to steal and how best to travel south, aiming to leave sometime between the middle of April and the middle of May.
“God, won’t it be a day, the day we leave this goddamned place,” York said one afternoon, as he and Emmens watched the ice float downriver.
“We don’t know when we are leaving this place, but we do know that someday we will,” Emmens said. “Think of all these people around us. They’ll never get out.”
The raiders were continuing to prepare for the spring escape when a well-dressed Russian captain and major arrived from Moscow late in the morning of March 25. The major removed a document from his briefcase.
“This letter was received in Moscow a short time ago,” the Russian officer announced. “Did you write it?”
York confirmed.
“We are here to tell you that the first of your requests cannot be granted. That is the request to be released from the Soviet Union,” the major said, a smile stretched across his face. “But our government has decided to grant you the second two requests. You will be moved to a warmer climate and you will be allowed to work.”
York translated the news for the others.
“Ee-ow-ee!” Herndon shouted.
“You have been here for many months,” the major continued. “When can you be ready to leave?”
“Ready?” York asked, still floored by the news. “I couldn’t believe my ears,” he later recalled. “I could be ready in five minutes.”
The raiders gathered up their few belongings and then sat down with the Russian officers for a final meal of black bread, tea, and cabbage.
“Where are we going?” York asked.
“In due time you will know everything.”
THE AIRMEN SET OFF around four that afternoon with the Russians in a motorcade of four cars, thrilled after seven months to finally see the dismal village of Okhansk disappear in the rearview mirror. Snow fell as the Russians drove through the afternoon and evening to the city of Molotov, a journey that took twelve hours and several spare tires to cover barely a hundred miles. In Molotov the officers checked the raiders into a hotel. “We had to walk up. The elevators didn’t run, but the walls were still red plush; the old gaslight fixtures were still there but didn’t burn any more,” Emmens recalled, “evidence of a more luxurious time way back when the czars lived.”
The major took the airmen’s chest, waist, and shoe measurements and outfitted them in Russian uniforms, complete with felt boots, fur caps with the red star insignia on the front, and shirts with buttons emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. The major informed the raiders that he had tickets for them that evening to see the Leningrad Ballet perform Swan Lake. The return to civilization proved startling. “At the end of the ballet we stood up with the rest of the audience and applauded,” Emmens later wrote. “The ballerina took her curtain calls gracefully, and each time she came out, after first bowing to the audience, she came over and made her special bow to our box.”
After several days the Russian officers escorted the raiders to an airport for the flight south to the city of Chkalov, located northeast of the Caspian Sea. The airmen looked down as the plane approached, amazed to see camels on the ground below, a sense of wonderment bested only by the discovery of the first and only flush toilet the fliers would see in Russia. “Chkolov presented the same dismal picture that every other place had,” Emmens recalled. “The same ragged people trudged along in silence. There were no stores, no signs of business, as we know the meaning of the word. Doorways and windows of what had apparently once been stores were boarded up.”
After spending a few days in Chkalov, which included a night at the opera, the raiders climbed aboard a train. Unlike the passenger car on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, this one had red carpet on the floor and red plush seats. “Well worn,” Emmens noted, “but not worn out yet.” The train chugged south for eight days through Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as the temperatures rose and vendors held up various fruits at each stop. York shared a compartment with a stocky young Russian named Kolya, who welcomed the opportunity to practice his English. Kolya oversaw lend-lease supplies imported through Iran, and beneath his seat he carried suitcases loaded with Spam, Maxwell House coffee, and, of course, vodka, which he gladly shared with the raiders.
“Where are you going?” Kolya asked at one point.
“We haven’t the faintest idea,” York answered.
“That’s typical of my country, especially with strangers.”
York never missed an opportunity to press his new friend for help with escape, though Kolya always demurred, arguing that he was sympathetic to the interned raiders, but reluctant to go against the wishes of his government.
“You must be patient,” Kolya advised. “You will fight again.”
The train pulled into the station in Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, separated from neighboring Iran by rugged mountains with peaks that reached as high as ten thousand feet. The raiders bid farewell to Kolya, who also disembarked, and climbed into several cars, driving to a small adobe house surrounded by a high mud fence. The airmen’s primitive new home consisted of a couple of rooms, one with two beds, the other with three, all-iron cots, each with a single blanket but otherwise void of mattresses, sheets, and pillows. The property’s only water came from a spigot in the backyard; a hole in the ground shielded by a three-sided wooden fence served as the toilet.
“I had nothing to do with choosing this place,” the embarrassed major confessed to the raiders.
“Home sweet home!” Emmens said. “We sure went from bad to worse.”
York was less politic.
“These bastards!” he exclaimed. “These dirty, goddamned bastards!”
The major soon departed. A local officer would check on the airmen each night, and an elderly and toothless groundskeeper would prepare meals for them. The raiders climbed aboard a bus each morning starting on April 10 and headed to work in a local factory that specialized in overhauling two-wing trainer planes. The factory’s foreman put York and Emmens to work dismantling a plane fuselage, while Herndon and Pohl cleaned instruments and Laban worked on small engines. The workday ran from 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., interrupted by a morning and afternoon break as well as an hour-and-a-half lunch that consisted of bread and noodles, measured out by the gram.
The only information of the outside world came from a newspaper, posted on the factory’s bulletin board, which the airmen perused daily. In that paper York and his crew read about President Roosevelt’s release of details of the Tokyo raid as well as the fact that the Japanese had executed some of the airmen. “This news was a shock to us,” Emmens later wrote. “It made us feel ashamed of complaining about our lot. But it did not lessen our determination to get out of the Soviet Union.”
Kolya knocked on the door one night soon after the raiders settled into Ashkhabad, beginning a series of clandestine meetings with the Americans, often at his house over dinner. Each time the raiders pressed upon him their desire to escape, wearing Kolya down over several weeks. “Very well,” he finally told them. “I can help you and I will. You must place yourselves completely in my hands.” Kolya warned the raiders to be patient and under no circumstances try to escape alone. “The border is manned by Russian troops, dogs, mines, and barbed wire,” he said. “You cannot do it alone. Do not try!”
Kolya’s offer to help thrilled the airmen, as best noted by Emmens: “Our spirits rose to the heavens.” That spike in morale soon waned as several days passed and then a week. Koyla told the men his initial plan had collapsed, cautioning the raiders to remain patient and not to try to escape on their own. The airmen’s frustration came to a head at dinner one night at Kolya’s house when Laban drank too much.
“Sergeant, why don’t you eat something?” York said. “You’ll feel better.”
The inebriated airman instead stood up at the dinner table and exploded at Kolya. “You and that goddamn boss of yours named Stalin can go piss up a rope,” Laban shouted. “You are nothing but a bunch of goddamn SOBs.”
“Laban,” York said, jumping to his feet with clenched fists. “Shut up.”
“And you,” the sergeant countered, turning to address his commanding officer, “you SOB, can go to hell.”
York shot a glance at Emmens. “You and Herndon and Pohl get Laban out of here,” he demanded. “Take him home.”
Herndon and Pohl each grabbed Laban under one arm and dragged him out the door. Emmens told York to try to salvage the situation and then followed the others. Laban yelled and swore as the airmen dragged him up the street.
“Laban, for Christ’s sake,” Emmens said when he caught up to them. “Straighten up, will you?”
Laban whirled around and punched Emmens. The pilot felt blood spurt from his left eyebrow and grew enraged. He punched Laban so hard on the side of his nose that his upper plate of false teeth flew out, hit the ground, and broke.
York arrived home half an hour later, telling Emmens that despite Laban’s outburst Kolya agreed to still help. The lamplight illuminated his friend’s black eye.
“What in the hell happened to you?”
Emmens related the story of the fistfight.
“Let’s court-martial him when we get out,” York said.
Kolya soon came up with a new plan, referring the raiders to a local smuggler who might be able to help them get across the Iranian border.
“I can’t be seen with him. I can’t introduce you, but I know the man by sight,” Kolya told them. “He walks around the town square very often. On Sunday I will sit with York in the town square on a bench. When I spot the man, I will point him out, and then I will leave. The rest is up to you.”
The plan unfolded just as outlined. Kolya pointed out the pacing smuggler, and York fell in behind him.
“You’re Abdul Arram, aren’t you?” York asked.
The man turned and looked at the airman, shook his head, and continued walking. York chased after him. “You’re Abdul Arram,” he repeated. “I know you are!”
“And if I am Abdul Arram?” the man said, turning to face York.
“I want you to do some work for me.”
“What kind of work?”
York told him he needed five Americans smuggled out of Russia into neighboring Iran. The man refused.
“I can pay,” York said. “Five hundred rubles.”
“Impossible,” the smuggler countered. “Do not speak to me any more!”
“—or in dollars!”
The mention of American currency stopped the smuggler. He demanded $800 to transport the Americans to Mashhad, the first major city across the border and home to the British consulate. York had won about $250 playing poker on board the Hornet. Emmens had another $60, and the three other airmen combined had about $40.
“One hundred dollars,” York offered.
The smuggler countered at seven hundred, but York continued to beat him down. “Four hundred,” Arram stammered, “or no go!”
“Two hundred fifty is all that we have,” York said.
“Agreed!”
The plan sounded exceedingly simple. A truck would arrive in front of the airmen’s adobe house just before midnight on May 10. When the driver killed the engine, the men would climb into the back and lie flat. By sunrise the raiders would be in Iran. “It seemed like a dream,” Emmens recalled. “There it was—we were leaving!”
The next few days crawled by as the raiders worked at the factory and anxiously awaited the night of escape. The airmen counted out the smuggler’s $250 fee and gave the rest to Kolya, who prepared a special departure bag of vodka and caviar for the raiders and sketched them a map of Mashhad, pinpointing the British consulate. The airmen stood by anxiously that Monday as the clock approached midnight. “There was only silence in the night outside,” Emmens recalled. “None of us talked. We were all straining to hear the sound of an automobile engine.”
Midnight came—and went. “Suddenly we all heard it at once,” Emmens wrote. “There was the unmistakable racing of the motor of a truck as the driver shifted from high into second gear. It was turning the corner onto our street.”
The raiders slipped outside and opened the gate, watching as the truck came to a stop out front. This was it—the moment the airmen had long awaited. The fliers climbed into the back of the truck. A match illuminated Abdul Arram, who wanted his money. York gave him a down payment of $100, but the smuggler demanded all $250.
“More—Mashhad,” York countered. “In Mashhad—more money!”
The smuggler reluctantly agreed and hissed at the airmen to lie down before he climbed into the truck’s cab with the driver. The raiders heard the driver turn the ignition key, but the truck refused to start. “It ground over and over just trying to get started,” Emmens later recalled. “It wouldn’t catch.”
Arram climbed out of the cab and peered over the side of the truck, telling them that the driver had to run into town to get a part. He suggested that two of the raiders wait in the truck and the other three go back inside the adobe house. The minutes dragged until the driver returned as promised with the part. A few minutes later the truck grumbled to life. The raiders climbed into the back, covering up in the tarp. “The bottom of that truck was certainly hard, but it felt like a bed of roses to us,” Emmens wrote. “It was carrying us out of that godforsaken and godless country—we hoped!”
The truck started and set off down the road, turning onto a paved highway and rattling as it picked up speed and headed toward the mountains. “We could tell we were going south,” Emmens recalled. “We took the tarpaulin down. It was night, and nobody could see us. There was no traffic on the road or anything.”
The raiders felt the driver shift into a lower gear as the truck began to climb into the mountains. Another hour passed. The truck slowed down and pulled off the road. The airmen heard a screwdriver on metal as the driver swapped out the license plates. The truck then started off, only to pull over again soon thereafter.
“Out,” someone demanded.
The raiders climbed out just as a man emerged from the bushes, his face obscured in the dark.
“Pssst,” the stranger beckoned. “Come on.”
The airmen set out on foot in a single file, following the mysterious guide up the mountain. After the men had traveled barely a few hundred feet, the truck shifted into gear and pulled back onto the highway. The hike proved tough, because the mountainside consisted mostly of shale and was void of any vegetation. “You would take one step up, and you would slide back two,” Emmens recalled. “We were having a hard time frankly in our physical condition keeping up with the guy.”
The hike soon exhausted York, who vomited in darkness. “I don’t think I can go up this thing any farther,” he said. “Why don’t you guys go ahead?”
The others refused, insisting the guide slow down. The airmen heard a rifle shot in the distance that echoed off the canyon walls followed by a barking dog. The raiders began finally to descend the mountain, which made for a far easier trek. At one point the guide demanded the men drop down and worm forward on their bellies, which the fliers later surmised was likely the actual border crossing. Shortly before daybreak the exhausted raiders, their clothes now ragged and torn from the hike, collapsed in an irrigation ditch alongside a highway. The same truck that had first carried the men into the mountains soon appeared, pulling off the highway. The fliers scrambled into the back. “The guy who had been our guide disappeared,” Emmens recalled. “We never did see him. He was just sort of a mythical character who led us over there.”
The driver slipped the truck into gear and pulled back onto the highway. Even though the airmen were now in Iran, Russian forces still occupied certain areas close to the border. The raiders felt the truck again slow. Emmens peeked out from under the tarp and saw a checkpoint. A wooden arch crossed the highway with a red star in the center and a picture of Stalin. The truck stopped, and Emmens could hear an animated conversation between the driver and the Russian troops. He then heard boots on gravel approaching the rear of the truck. Suddenly someone yanked the tarp down. “I was staring directly into a face a bare twelve inches above mine. There was a growth of stubble on the face, and a fur cap with a red star on it above the face.”
“Oh, my God,” the airman thought. “We have been caught.”
Emmens closed his eyes and froze. The conversation outside the truck continued, and when Emmens opened his eyes the Russian face was gone. He suddenly felt the truck begin to move. “Slowly the guardrail, the arch, Stalin, and the red star passed over our heads and behind us,” he recalled. “I began to breathe again.”
The truck continued down the highway. The sun was now coming up as the airmen surveyed the scene. “It was desolate country; no trees in sight, just shale rock, stretching way ahead,” Emmens recalled. “Way down in the valley ahead of us, there was a glint of a gold dome as the sun was just breaking over that horizon.”
The truck motored on throughout the morning, pulling off onto the shoulder of the highway around noon. Abdul climbed out of the cab and came back.
“Out,” he ordered. ”Money.”
“Mashhad,” the raiders protested.
The smuggler pointed to the town a few miles down the road. “Impossible,” he told the raiders. “Guards—Russians.”
The men climbed out and handed over the remaining $150. The truck turned around and headed back down the highway. The fliers scrambled off the highway and into a nearby bomb crater about a hundred feet away. Tired and hungry, the men tore into the sack of supplies Kolya had given them.
“Well, here we are!” York announced. “A couple of miles out of Mashhad, Persia, sitting in a bomb crater eating black caviar, black bread, and drinking vodka. I wonder how many other Americans have done this.”
“We’re not in Mashhad yet,” Herndon cautioned.
The men decided York and Emmens would sneak into town, find the British consulate, and return with help, while the others remained hidden in the crater. To mark the spot the raiders lined up the vodka bottles on the crater’s rim.
The two pilots set off down the highway. Closer to town other locals appeared on the highway, coming and going. No one seemed to notice the airmen. A bridge led into Mashhad, guarded by a Russian sentry. Each time a cart passed over the bridge, the Russian would stop and search it, a process that took a few minutes but distracted the guard from the foot traffic that continued to flow into the town.
The airmen waited for the perfect time, committing Kolya’s diagram of the city to memory about the time a truck rolled up toward the bridge.
“Now’s our chance!” York announced.
The guard stopped the truck and started to search it, while the raiders blended in with the other foot traffic over the bridge. “It wasn’t more than fifty feet across the thing. The temptation to break into a run was almost irresistible,” Emmens recalled. “We didn’t look back after we had passed, but we did increase the speed of our steps.”
The fliers entered the town, surprised to see stores that sold cigarettes and other commodities unavailable in Russia. Up ahead the raiders spotted a Russian patrol. The airmen hustled across the street and pressed against a storefront, pretending to window-shop while watching in the reflection as the patrol marched past. The fliers hurried the final few blocks to the consulate, turning on the street to see the whitewashed walls and the arched entrance. Several soldiers stood guard. “We took a deep breath,” Emmens recalled. “We sauntered very casually on that side of the street until we got exactly opposite the arch door. We just turned and rushed inside the gates.”
Iranian soldiers poured out of the guardhouse and pinned the raiders against the wall with bayonets.
“American! American!” the raiders shouted. “British consul!
A turbaned officer approached, looking the airmen over. “British consul not here,” he finally said. “Vice consul here.”
“Fine,” the airmen said. “Vice consul.”
Guards led the airmen inside, who marveled at the consulate’s immaculate lawns, flowers, and swimming pool. A tethered gazelle played at the end of a long leash staked in the yard. The paradisiacal scene reminded Emmens of the Garden of Eden.
“Did you ever see anything as beautiful as this?” York asked.
“Never!”
The airmen jotted their names and ranks on a sheet of paper, identifying themselves as members of the U.S. Army Air Forces. The guard vanished, and less than a minute later the door burst open and the vice consul appeared.
“My God,” he announced. “Where in the hell did you guys come from?”
The airmen instructed the British on how to find the other three raiders, and forty-five minutes later the crew was reunited. The exhausted raiders would within days begin the long voyage home through India, North Africa, and South America before finally touching down in Washington, but in the meantime the British showered them with hospitality, beginning that afternoon with the vice consul.
“Would you like a scotch and soda?”