In war as it is fought today only a few rules are left—only a few shreds of law and custom which, it was thought, governed the relations of belligerents to each other.
—ERNEST LINDLEY, COLUMNIST, APRIL 23, 1943
THE SAME DAY THE Japanese executed Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz, guards came for the other five raiders in Kiangwan. Dressed in crisp uniforms and armed with rifles and sabers, the Japanese pulled the aviators out one by one that gray and foggy morning. “Though we were in separate cells and had no chance to talk to each other, we had all come to the same conclusion—if the verdict was execution we were going to try to make a break,” Bobby Hite and Jacob DeShazer would later write. “It was a strange thing, but most of us armed ourselves with toothbrushes. We figured we might jab a guard in the face with a toothbrush to start the break.”
The guards marched the airmen back into the courtroom. The raiders realized with alarm that there were only five of them: Hite, DeShazer, Chase Nielsen, George Barr, and Bob Meder. Hallmark’s one-night stay at Kiangwan was in a different cellblock, so as far as the others knew, the pilot was still at Bridge House, recovering from his battle with dysentery. The Japanese had taken Farrow and Spatz out of their cells the night before, but the airmen never returned. Where were the others? They didn’t have to wonder long. “We lined up before the bench,” Hite and DeShazer recalled, “and looked our judges straight in the eye.”
The Japanese read a short statement and then turned to the interpreter, whose hands trembled, sweat dripping from his face.
“For bombing and strafing school areas you have been sentenced to death,” the interpreter began.
The airmen crouched, ready to make a break for it if the verdict was death. Guards sensed the tensions and clutched their sword hilts.
“But through the gracious majesty of the emperor,” the interpreter continued, “you have been spared to life imprisonment with special treatment.”
With that the sentencing was over. The entire proceeding lasted less than three minutes. The guards marched the raiders back to their cells and solitary confinement. “I could not help feeling a strange sense of joy, even though solitary confinement and a long war awaited any possible chance of freedom,” DeShazer later said. “At the same time it seemed almost hopeless to think of ever being free again, since the most probable thing would be that we would be executed when America did win the war.”
On the floor of cell no. 3, Meder scratched the date, followed by his name, rank, and serial number. He noted that he was in the Army Air Forces and a member of a B-25 detachment. He concluded with a plea for anyone who might one day read his missive: “Notify U.S. Army—Life Imprisonment.”
Other raiders likewise used old fish bones and bits of seashells to carve messages on the floors. To pass the time, Barr scratched a calendar. He marked out the days from the first of October through the twenty-third, before he gave up. He never even wrote out the dates for the rest of October or filled in the squares for the November calendar he started. Four boards in from his cell door, the navigator etched a personal testament that war crimes investigators would later find:
Lt. G. Barr, USAAC—34th Bomb Sqdn.—Columbia, SC., USA—Took off from AC Hornet 4/17/42—Bombed Nagoya Japan—Flew 17 hours to China—No gas. Jumped—Captured 4/18/1942.
The heat and humidity of summer gave way to a long and bitter winter as temperatures dipped below freezing. The airmen struggled in unheated cells with little more than a few blankets to keep themselves warm. In December the Japanese moved the raiders into one large cell. “We were so thrilled and so hungry to be together,” Hite recalled, “that we just visited, visited, and visited for days and days and days.”
The meager diet of rice and turnip or onion soup continued to wear down their health, though the airmen tried to perform calisthenics. DeShazer shimmied up the narrow cells walls by pressing his feet against one wall and his hands against the other. Up high he had a view out the window of the countryside that stretched for miles. Hite set a goal of twenty pushups, only to discover in his weakened state that he could hardly do ten. He pushed himself one time and blacked out and hit his head.
Dysentery soon added to Hite’s troubles. The Japanese moved the other raiders out of the cell, but left Meder to help care for his sick friend. Hite had managed to hang on to a few dollars when captured, which he used to convince some of the guards to buy him extra food to help him recover. He had failed, though, to consider sharing it with his fellow raiders, a fact he later regretted. “These are things that happened to you as a prisoner,” he recalled. “Sometimes things that you discover about yourself are not too pretty.”
The Japanese moved the men out of Kiangwan on April 17, 1943, almost a year to the day since the men had lifted off from the deck of the Hornet. Guards ushered the handcuffed prisoners aboard a plane, tethering them to their seats, but removing their blindfolds. The airmen welcomed the chance to see the landscape far below. “It was flat country dotted with rice paddies,” DeShazer and Hite recalled. “We thought now how fortunate we were not to make a break for liberty. There was no place to hide. We would have been captured easily and probably shot at once.”
The men arrived at the Japanese military prison in Nanking—a new facility constructed of brick and concrete and surrounded by a high wall—which boasted barely a dozen cells; fortunately most proved vermin free. The raiders once again landed in solitary confinement in nine-by-twelve cells, though Nielsen’s and Barr’s were several feet larger. A single window seven feet off the ground let in only limited light. Guards could look in on the prisoners through a screen slot in the wooden door and pass food through a six-inch panel near the bottom. “The furnishings consisted of a grass mat and three very thin cotton blankets,” Hite and DeShazer said. “When we sat we sat on the concrete floor.”
The raiders settled into life in the new prison, where the lone highlight of each day consisted of a half hour of exercise in the prison yard at 10:30 a.m., but only if the weather permitted. “The rest of the time,” the men recalled, “we just sat or trudged around our narrow cells, like caged animals.” Days turned into weeks and then months as the men battled the loneliness and fatigue of hours spent solo in a concrete cell. “Day in and day out it was the same thing—sitting in our cells with nothing to occupy our time,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “After we got to know our guards better we sometimes kidded them about Japan losing the war. Generally, this infuriated them and often they’d draw their swords and threaten us. Then we’d laugh and beckon them to come into the cells and carry out the threat, but they never did.”
The Japanese found other ways to retaliate, as Barr later testified: “Some guards would torment us by calling us to the little window and then spitting in our faces or have a fellow guard douse our already shivery body with cold water.” Though the airmen were largely spared the beatings given fellow Chinese prisoners, whose screams at times reverberated through the cellblock, their punishment was more subtle but no less severe: the withholding of food. The guards had the power to control who lived—and who died. It wasn’t wise, the raiders realized, to push them too hard.
One day Nielsen turned over his aluminum drinking cup to discover a message scratched on the bottom: “Connie G. Battles, United States Marines.” The Japanese had captured Battles on Wake in December 1941. This was the first time the airmen surmised there might be other captured Americans in the Nanking prison. Nielsen rubbed out Battles’s name and scratched his own. The cup went from cell to cell until it eventually returned to Battles, who had managed during his time in a Shanghai prison camp to pick up various reports on the war’s progress that he now shared. The men dubbed this primitive communications system the “tincup news service.”
“Russians on German border,” one message read.
The raiders in exchange could offer little more than each of their names, scratched on the bottom with either a nail or an old fish bone. Whoever found a message would rub it off so that Battles knew the information was received. The men would then whisper the news among themselves at exercise time. “That way we learned that the Yanks were making plenty of progress, both in Europe and Asia,” Hite and DeShazer later wrote. “It was awfully sketchy information, of course, but at least it was good news and it did more to keep us sane and full of hope than any other thing.”
The guards over time figured out the system, forcing the men to adapt. Meder devised a rudimentary way to communicate via Morse code: a rap on the wall equaled a dot and a scratch meant a dash. The creative pilot likewise came up with most of the nicknames the airmen used for the guards, names such as Big Ugly and Little Ugly, the Goon, the Mule, and Frankenstein. “He could see something funny in even the grimmest of our experiences with the Japs,” Hite and DeShazer recalled. “He was certain that he would get out alive and he used to tap out his post-war plans through the cell wall. He wanted to start a men’s furnishing store back in Lakewood, Ohio.”
Dysentery struck Meder in early September about the time the hot and humid summer gave way to cooler fall weather. The meager rations had already so whittled his five-foot-eleven-inch frame that fellow fliers described him as a “toothpick.” Beriberi soon added to his troubles. The pilot grew so weak that by November he stopped leaving his cell each morning for exercise. He could do little more than wallow on his mat. “We begged to go in to nurse him,” Barr recalled. “Kindness was all the medication we had, but it would have helped. We were refused.”
The other raiders persuaded Meder on December 1 to come outside for exercise. His feet were so swollen that all he could do was sit on the steps in the sun. One of the guards harassed him, and Meder rose to the challenge.
“Listen,” he said in a mix of English and Japanese. “Sick as I am I can lick the whole damn bunch of you.”
He took a swing only to miss and fall down. “It was sort of sad, but it was sort of good to see that even in as bad a shape that he was in, that the spirit was still willing,” Hite recalled. “Bob knew that he was in real bad shape. He was just sort of a skeleton.”
Hite asked him whether there was anything he could do for him.
“Just pray,” Meder answered.
The others helped Meder back to his cell afterward. Hite was in the cell next to him. He heard his fellow pilot tell the guard known as Cyclops the address of his parents and ask him, if he died, would he please write them and send them his clothes.
Barr helped distribute dinner that evening for the guards. He slid Meder’s mess kit through the slot but didn’t hear anyone move. The navigator summoned a guard, who unlocked the cell door and found Meder dead.
The Japanese medical report of his death, discovered after the war, painted a heroic, albeit bogus, picture of efforts made to save Meder, from giving him special glucose and vitamin B injections when he first fell sick to the desperate final effort to resuscitate him when he died. “Immediately artificial respiration was tried and 3.0 cc of camphor was injected under the skin and 1.0 cc of adrenaline was injected into the heart,” the report stated, “but the patient failed to recover.”
The sounds of saws and hammers filled the prison the next day. Unaware that his friend had died, DeShazer peered out the window, startled to see guards building a coffin. On December 3 guards marched each of the prisoners into Meder’s cell. The Japanese had stuffed cotton in his mouth. “The body was in a rough box and there were a few chrysanthemums on Bob’s breast,” Hite and DeShazer recalled. “Each of us said a silent prayer, but there were no religious services.”
Meder’s death pained the others; the Japanese seized on it as a means to torment them. “For several days after that, the guards would shout out Bob’s number (it was three) when they passed his cell,” Hite and DeShazer later wrote. “They’d wait for an answer, which couldn’t come, of course, and then they’d laugh.”
Meder had often said he would rather be dead and his family know it than be alive with no one knowing it. He had left a letter for his parents and sister, sealing it with the message: “To be opened only in the event of my death.”
“I am writing this letter on December 7, 1941—that fateful day when the Japanese started the spark of this conflagration. As it has been the will of God I have answered my country’s call and I pray that whatever efforts I may have exerted have been to some avail,” Meder began his final farewell. “The main purpose of this letter to you is to try at this very last minute to comfort you. During this time of strife for all, those of you that have had to sacrifice loved ones are the real heroes of any struggle. The word hero is truly inadequate. Just remember that the soul of a person is greater than his own physical body; therefore, you have not lost me, my spirit shall ever be with you, watching, and aiding if possible from wherever the ‘Great Beyond’ may be. Be brave, not bitter, be determined, not overcome. That is the job for those of you that I love most dearly. Democracy shall continue. It is our sacrifice for that cause.”
Meder begged of his family one final request. “Please promise to never let anything separate you,” he wrote. “Mend any petty disagreements—continue as a loving family on its way to do its part in this world. Mother and Dad, never let anything become so mistakenly important to cause such a thing as a separation or a divorce. And Doris-Mae, never let your love for Mother and Dad taper off. I ask these things of you in my memory. I know you will not fail me!” Meder reiterated his hope that his parents and sister would not allow his death to overwhelm them. “I bless and love you all very dearly; some day I feel very certain that we shall all be united in a happier life in the life ahead,” he concluded. “God bless and protect you. Keep up your courage!”
After the war Doolittle would deliver a speech in Cleveland on October 18, 1945. Meder’s parents were in attendance. “His mission was accomplished—gloriously,” Doolittle told them and the audience. “He was not only one of the outstanding heroes of the war, but a martyr to the cause of your freedom and mine. Bob was a victim of the barbarism of the Japs who sacrificed him on the altar of hate.”
Meder’s sacrifice meant the others got two extra buns with each meal, but it also taught them a lesson. “Any of us can die at any time,” Hite thought. “We could all die and they could do away with us and nobody would ever know the difference.”
As the months marched past, the raiders grew increasingly withdrawn. The solitude tortured them. “We had to fight ourselves,” Hite and DeShazer said, “to keep from going mad.” The men lived inside their imaginations. Nielsen envisioned the house he would one day build for himself, while Hite planned out a farm back home in Texas. “I would think about the wonderful meals I’d have when I got out. Or I’d plan escapes in minute detail, going over every step in my mind,” Barr remembered. “And then in my mind I’d raise sheep, rabbits, hogs or wheat. I’d go through every step, planting, fertilizing, weeding. I raised chickens in imaginary batteries. Maybe I’d ‘work’ on one occupation for a couple of days, go on to another, and then go back to the first one. It’s amazing what your mind can do under such circumstances.”
The men on occasion still battled with the guards. That happened after exercise one day when the guards tried to make Barr wash his feet in the snow. The navigator refused and started back toward his cell. The guard struck him on the legs with his sword. “I saw red,” Barr later wrote. “I whirled and punched him in the nose. He went down and the other guards ran to help him. I was weak, but the Japs don’t know how to use their fists and I did all right until I was overpowered by sheer numbers.”
Guards dragged Barr back outside into the exercise yard. A couple held him while others slipped on a straitjacket, lacing it up so tight that it squeezed his chest and he gasped for air. “Panic comes quick when you cannot get your breath or move your arms to help yourself. There was no pain at first, only the horrible choking for air. I rolled over on my side because it seemed I could gulp a little more air in that position,” he recalled. “Then the pain began. At the start there is only numbness, but when the blood forces its way through the constricted channels the pain becomes frightful. I could hear myself making animal-like noises as I fought for breath. There was enormous pressure at my eyeballs and in my nostrils. I was almost hysterical with panic and pain.”
The other prisoners, forced back into their cells, listened as Barr suffered. “We could hear him making a sobbing noise,” Hite and DeShazer recalled, “but there was nothing we could do to help.”
A half hour later the guards pulled the laces even tighter. The prison commandant calmly stared at Barr, ticking off the minutes with a stopwatch. “My lungs, heart, liver were all crushed together with the ribs sticking in,” Barr wrote. “The perspiration poured down my face and into my eyes, although it was a cold day.”
Finally after an hour the guards released him. Barr’s brutal punishment angered Misake, one of the few guards who showed compassion to the navigator. “Misake was among the guards standing by watching me groan and sweat in the snowdrift into which I had been thrown, but he did not laugh,” Barr recalled. “When the order came for my release, he was the first to jump to my rescue.” Misake escorted the exhausted airman back to his cell and in a surprise gesture offered him a cigarette. “He took a frightful chance doing that,” Barr remembered, “and I’ll never forget it or him.”
The men battled the nagging physical pains of starvation, surviving on watery rice and unsweetened tea. “After awhile you get so you do not want to eat, and yet you are ravenously hungry,” Barr recalled. “You eat because instinct tells you that you must eat to live, but I had to force the food down my throat.” The fliers lost so much weight that the concrete floors pained them. Beriberi only compounded the misery. “At times the swelling from beriberi was so intense that we were required to push it back from around our eyes to be able to even open them,” Nielsen later wrote. “Also our feet, hands, arms, and legs would puff up until our hands and feet looked like they were clubbed. Our joints ached continually and at times it was difficult to walk.”
The dark days of hunger and hopelessness forced the men to wrestle with difficult questions. “We began to think a lot about death,” admitted Hite and DeShazer. “During our exercise periods we talked about it and wondered why Meder had to be taken. Our only consolation was that it had to be the will of God.”
“We thought a lot about religion,” added Barr. “When you’re in tough straits God is the only one you can rely on.” Nielsen agreed. “Faith kept me alive,” he said. “Faith in my nation. My religion. My creator.”
Hite wrote to the prison commandant, requesting a Bible. To his surprise, one soon arrived; the King James version, still stamped with a $1.97 price tag. “It was sort of like a man being in the desert and finding a cool pool,” he recalled. “We hadn’t had anything to read. We didn’t have newspapers. We didn’t have radio. We didn’t have books. We didn’t have anything. So this Bible was really a tremendous thing that happened to us.”
The men took turns reading the Bible, passing it from cell to cell as each man pored over it in the dim light. “I lived on hate for the first year and a half. Hatred is a very strong emotion,” Hite recalled. “I think we were able to kind of keep ourselves together living on hate, instead of laying down and giving up.” DeShazer echoed Hite, later writing that his hatred of the Japanese nearly drove him crazy. “The way the Japanese treated me, I had to turn to Christ,” he remembered. “No matter what they did to me, I prayed. I prayed for the strength to live. And I prayed for the strength, somehow, to find forgiveness for what they were doing to me.”
That hostility and anger soon vanished. “We decided that we had no hatred for our guards, vicious as they were. They were ignorant and mean, but perhaps—we thought—there was some good in them. The only way to develop that goodness would be by understanding and education—not by brutally mistreating them as they were doing to us,” Hite and DeShazer later wrote. “The officers were different. They were educated men. They gave the orders for punishment. They must be punished in return. But the retribution should be just. They would not be beaten as we were. They should be tried in a court of justice and disciplined as we do our own criminals.”
DeShazer was the most affected. “One day in my cell I felt the call as clearly as though a voice were speaking to me,” he said, looking back. “I don’t mean I heard a voice. It was more like a flash of truth. I even tried to think about something else, but I couldn’t.” He decided there in that awful cell in Nanking that if he survived the war he would return to Japan as a missionary. He felt his burden lift. “Hunger, starvation, and a freezing cold prison cell no longer had horrors for me. They would be only a passing moment. Even death could hold no threat when I knew that God had saved me,” he recalled. “There will be no pain, no suffering, no sorrow, no loneliness in heaven.”
The bombardier put his newfound faith to the test. He ignored the hostility of the guards and instead tried to befriend one of them.
“How are you?” he asked each day with a smile.
To his surprise after six days of this the guard presented DeShazer with a sweet potato. “Boy,” he thought. “This really works.”
Hite fell ill around the summer of 1944, right after the Japanese administered a round of vaccinations. The six-foot flier’s weight fell to around eighty-eight pounds, and his body burned for five days with a 105-degree fever. The Japanese moved him to a cell with a screen door, but even then he was too weak to talk. “I was so sick I couldn’t even raise my head,” he said. “I just lay there.”
The pilot heard Nielsen and DeShazer outside his door one day. “Hite won’t be here tomorrow,” Nielsen said. “I don’t think he can make it.”
The news rattled Hite. “I thought I was going to die. I prayed to the Lord, told him I was willing to die if that’s what he wanted, that mother was a widow and she might need me, but that I wasn’t afraid to die and I was trusting in him,” he later said. “It was the most amazing thing. I started getting well right there.”
The weeks slid past as summer turned into fall and 1944 rolled into 1945. Guards came for the raiders finally at 6:30 a.m. on June 12, 1945, armed with hoods and handcuffs. The airmen boarded a train later that morning for the forty-hour journey to Peiping, as Peking was officially named since 1928. Guards removed the hoods, but tied the fliers to the seats. The train transported Japanese officers, so the airmen enjoyed the same meals, which included beef. “It was the best food we’d had in three years. But our guards declined to give us any water. The result was that we had nothing to drink for 48 hours,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “When we got to Peiping we were literally sick with thirst.”
The raiders reached Peiping around noon on June 14. Guards slipped hoods over the airmen’s heads, then drove them to what was known as the North China Prison 1407, on North Hataman road about four miles outside of the city, a place a fellow prisoner of war would describe in an affidavit after the war as “hell.” There raiders landed in cells that measured ten feet by ten feet. Two small windows provided the only light, one on the heavy wooden door that faced an inside passageway. Guards allowed the prisoners to bathe once a week. “We were placed in solitary confinement again, and in Peiping we didn’t even have the half hour exercise period that was part of our Nanking regime,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “Our cells were just as primitive.”
The mood of the guards served as a barometer of the war’s progress. America’s maritime offensive had reached a climax in the summer of 1944 with the capture of the Marianas, the ultimate prize of the Pacific. The volcanic archipelago of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian—just fifteen hundred miles south of Tokyo—provided bases for American B-29 bombers to reach Japan, to reduce its industrial cities to rubble, to continue the fight started by Jimmy Doolittle and his seventy-nine raiders. Japan’s loss of the Marianas led not only to the ouster of Hideki Tojo and his cabinet but to four of the most telling words of the war, uttered by Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano, Hirohito’s supreme naval adviser: “Hell is on us.”
And hell it was.
Day after day, week after week, B-29 Superfortresses darkened the skies over Japan by the hundreds. Engineers had spared nothing in the creation of Boeing’s aeronautical monster, a plane so powerful that even Doolittle said it “staggers the imagination.” The four-engine bomber could not only fly twice the distance of the Tokyo raid but also haul five times as much ordnance as each of Doolittle’s planes. America demonstrated the B-29’s terrifying power in an incendiary raid against Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, triggering an inferno so intense that pilots en route used the flames to navigate from two hundred miles out while the soot blackened the bombers’ bellies. The attack would prove the war’s single most destructive assault on an urban area, killing 83,793 people, injuring another 40,918, and leaving a million homeless. “I have never seen such a display of destruction,” wrote Boston Globe journalist Martin Sheridan, who flew in one of the B-29s. “I not only saw Tokyo burning furiously in many sections, but I smelled it.”
Bombers pounded Japan’s major cities night after night in raids Doolittle could only have dreamed of years earlier when he throttled up his B-25 that rainy morning on the deck of the Hornet. As workers punched out more bombers, the airborne armadas only grew larger; on some nights more than five hundred Superfortresses thundered in the skies overhead. In the war’s final months B-29s would fly more than 28,500 sorties against Japan, dropping almost 160,000 tons of bombs across sixty-six cities. The results were staggering. America would level some 158 square miles of Japanese cities, including more than 50 square miles of Tokyo, 15 of Osaka, and 11 of Nagoya. According to postwar Japanese records, the raids killed 330,000 people, injured another 475,000, and left 8.5 million homeless. “Japan eventually will be a nation without cities,” Doolittle declared in July when he arrived in the Pacific after Germany’s surrender. “A nomadic people.”
These attacks built up to the muggy morning of August 6 when Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr.’s B-29 roared down the coral runway on the tiny Pacific island of Tinian at two forty-five. His payload consisted of the single atomic bomb “Little Boy,” an ironic nickname considering experts predicted it would take two thousand loaded B-29s to rival the force of this one weapon. Tibbets appeared over Hiroshima and droppd his bomb at 8:15 a.m. Forty-three seconds later, the weapon detonated. Temperatures surpassed 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit, bubbling clay roof tiles and vaporizing human victims. American investigators after the war estimated that the attack, which leveled more than 4 square miles, killed approximately 80,000 men, women, and children and injured another 100,000. Three days later a second B-29 roared down Tinian’s darkened runway, carrying the atomic bomb dubbed “Fat Man.” The attack on Nagasaki flattened another 1.8 square miles and killed approximately 45,000 people and injured as many as 60,000.
DeShazer awoke that morning in his prison cell in China to hear an inner voice urging him to pray. The health of the Doolittle raiders had reached a new low. Beriberi had stricken both Hite and Barr; the latter was at times delirious.
“What shall I pray about?” DeShazer asked.
The voice told him to pray for peace. DeShazer did, unaware of what had happened on the Japanese homeland. He prayed that Japanese leaders would welcome peace and that the public would not be demoralized or taken advantage of in postwar Japan. He prayed from 7 a.m. until 2 p.m., when he heard the voice again. “You don’t need to pray anymore,” the voice told him. “Victory is won.”