The recent uninvited visit of U.S. bombers to our country seems to be President Roosevelt’s method of flattering the ignoramus within the United States.
—OSAKA MAINICHI, APRIL 29, 1942
RAY NICHOLS LOOKED DOWN from the B-24 at the Peiping airdrome at 5:15 p.m. on the afternoon of August 17, just two days after Emperor Hirohito had taken to the airwaves to announce Japan’s surrender. A major with the Office of Strategic Services, Nichols commanded a seven-man team code-named Magpie. On board the B-24 with Nichols sat Captain Edmund Carpenter; First Lieutenant Mahlon Perkins; First Lieutenant Fontaine Jarman Jr., the mission doctor; Staff Sergeant Dick Hamada, the Japanese translator; Corporal Melvin Richter, the Chinese interpreter; and Private First Class Nestor Jacot, the radioman. The team’s mission as outlined in the four-page orders was to immediately contact all Allied prisoner-of-war camps in the area, notify headquarters of the number and health of the prisoners, and begin emergency medical assistance.
Magpie was just one of many teams the OSS had assembled to parachute into China, Manchuria, Korea, and Indochina the moment the war ended to search out the estimated 22,000 American prisoners. News of Japan’s surrender, which would not formally take place until September 2, in a ceremony aboard the battleship Missouri, had been slow to trickle out, making such missions all the more perilous. But Nichols and others knew time was imperative when dealing with sick and injured captives, many of whom battled starvation. The B-24 had lifted off from Hsi-an that afternoon and was loaded down with everything from blankets and rations to blood plasma. “The weather was perfect—hot, sunny, and beautiful,” Jarman later wrote. “We arrived over Peking fully expecting to be met by swarms of Kamikaze fighters foresworn to knock us down and make the supreme sacrifice doing so. There were no other planes in the air.”
To prepare officials on the ground, the B-24 dropped hundreds of leaflets, many of which blew right back into the plane. Others missed the airdrome and drifted down atop the Pa Dao Wan Convent, where the mission report later noted that “the nuns found them quite interesting reading.” In addition, team members each carried a letter from General Albert Wedemeyer, who had replaced Vinegar Joe Stilwell in 1944, explaining the purpose of the mission. If Wedemeyer’s letter didn’t suffice, there was always cash. Each flier packed $10,000, with the exception of Nichols, who carried $50,000. As the last of the leaflets fluttered out of the bomber, the men looked down and saw hundreds of Japanese soldiers take up positions around the airfield. “We were low enough so that I could see they were all armed with rifles and pistols,” Jarman recalled. “I was praying that they had all gotten the word to quit but I had no way of knowing.”
The team members crowded around the opening of the belly gun turret, which had been removed to allow the men to bail out.
“Happy hunting!” the jumpmaster announced.
One after the other they bailed out, pulled the rip cord, and drifted down to the airfield below. “The plane circled once more, dropped our equipment and supplies, and then departed,” Jarman later wrote. “An almost overwhelming feeling of desolation swept over me as the B-24 faded away.”
Nichols, Perkins, and Hamada started toward the hangar, leaving the others to guard the team’s equipment. “A long shot rang out, evidently fired by some over eager solider, and a couple of our group hit the ground,” the team’s report stated. “The Japanese, on the whole, seemed rather disconcerted by our arrival.”
A flatbed truck loaded with Japanese troops rolled up. A lieutenant climbed down, along with several soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets, who surrounded the Americans. “What is going on here?” the Japanese officer asked.
“The war is over,” Nichols said and Hamada translated. “We’re here to retrieve our prisoners.”
“No,” the lieutenant barked. “The war is not over yet!”
The Japanese drove the soldiers to the airfield’s headquarters, where the officer of the day told Nichols he would have to wait for Lieutenant General Takahashi, commander of forces in central China. The general finally arrived at 6:30 p.m., in a Buick sedan “with much flourish, clicking of heels and presenting of arms.” Nichols again pressed his case, demanding the release of all Allied prisoners of war. “The General,” the mission’s report noted, “was courteous, but he flatly refused permission to see the POW’s until word arrived from Nanking. He pointed out that the war is actually not yet over, and though he would like to oblige, it was impossible.” Nichols expounded in a personal note in the report: “Relations were courteous, although I carefully refused ‘regretfully’ to dine with him or to accept any social invitation from his officers.”
The Japanese escorted the Americans to the Grand Hotel des Wagons-Lits in the city, where the frustrated rescuers spent August 18 awaiting permission to visit the area’s prisoner-of-war camps. “During all this day, it should be noted that we were virtually prisoners in the Grand Hotel,” the mission’s report stated. “The Japanese had warned us against wandering around promiscuously, for they asserted that their soldiers were still inclined to be trigger happy. Thus we had no news from the outside.”
Not until 5 p.m. the next day did a Japanese lieutenant colonel and captain finally arrive at the hotel. Nichols showed them Wedemeyer’s letter, and the officers explained that Japan planned to move the prisoners into town.
“We are anxious to get started on our job as soon as possible,” the major stated, according to a transcript of the meeting. “How many POW’s and internees are there?”
“Twelve POW’s and 317 internees,” the lieutenant colonel replied.
“We understood there were more POW’s.”
“Just twelve.”
“May we see the POW’s tomorrow?” the major pressed.
“Well, no,” the lieutenant colonel said, running through a list of excuses. “Perhaps the day after.”
Finally, on the afternoon of August 19, the Japanese took the soldiers to visit all the major internment centers, which housed mostly Allied civilians such as missionaries captured by the Japanese. Nichols messaged headquarters that the team located 317 internees, including 117 Americans, spread across ten locations. “It was much like calling on friends on New Year’s,” the team’s report stated. “Enthusiastic welcomes everywhere, and everywhere something to drink. We were obliged to insult our stomachs with a perfectly impossible combination of red wine, white wine, champagneted wine, pop, coffee and tea, but it was well worth it to see how happy we made everyone. We were even able to enjoy ten separate renditions of ‘God Bless America,’ sung by Dutch, Belgians, French, British, Germans, Chinese—not to mention Americans, and always with the kind of fervor that tends to bring an unexpected tear to the eye.”
At noon the next day the Japanese finally allowed the Americans to visit the prisoners of war, whom guards had relocated into town, lodging them at two hotels. The prisoners rejoiced at seeing uniformed Americans.
“Give it to ’em, lads,” many said.
Nichols sat down that afternoon with the commander of Fengtai, a large prisoner-of-war camp located about eight miles southwest of the city. The colonel with a walrus mustache assured Nichols that Japan had released all the prisoners. “While all this discussion was going on, the POW’s and internees were peering in the doorways and indicating disapproval of all that was said,” the team’s report stated. “A few of the internees sidled up to the officers who were not engaged in the conferring with the Japanese and pointed out that there were four prisoners whom the Japanese colonel had not mentioned at all and that they were even now dying in a prison in Peking. These men, they said, were the last of the Doolittle Raiders and were under sentence of death.”
ON AUGUST 16 THE RAIDERS noticed that the Japanese did not hold the usual morning drill, an aberration followed the next day by soldiers’ torching maps and charts outside in the courtyard. Throughout the day more trucks arrived loaded down with papers, which soldiers continued to feed to the fire. “We watched them from our windows and called to each other from our cells,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “It was a rainy, nasty day, but our hearts were happy. We knew something was going to happen.”
The guards were all dressed in crisp new uniforms and began escorting certain captives out of the prison, including Winfield Scott Cunningham, the famed commander of American forces at Wake. None of the airmen had known he was even in the prison. On the night of August 19 a guard entered each of the airmen’s cells.
“Ima amata watachi tomoduce,” he said. “We are now friends.”
The raiders received extra food the next day, before guards pulled them from their cells around 6 p.m. and clipped their thick and matted beards. A barber then shaved them with a straight razor. “We had to stand up during the shave and he lathered our faces with cold water,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “Our faces were pretty sore.”
Guards then offered the aviators a real prize—the chance to take a bath, albeit only in a bucket of hot water. “You can go to your country now,” one of the Japanese officers announced as the raiders cleaned themselves.
The airmen stared at him in disbelief.
“You can go to your country now,” the officer repeated. “The war is over.”
The airmen had grown alarmed at the absence of George Barr, who the raiders knew had struggled in recent days with dysentery. A guard finally brought the navigator in while the other three bathed. “We were so happy and excited that we slapped each other on the backs and cheered, but poor George was too sick to comprehend,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “He kept asking us where we were going.”
American soldiers arrived at the prison that evening around seven thirty. One of them paused in front of the door to Chase Nielsen’s primitive cell. “He looks like an American,” the soldier said. “Are you an American?”
Nielsen couldn’t speak. After three years, three months and thirty days, the moment of liberation had arrived—yet his voice failed him.
“He looks like an American,” the soldier repeated. “Open his door and let him out.”
Nielsen’s weight had fallen to just 103 pounds, leaving him a gaunt ghost of a man.
“Are you an American?” the soldier pressed again.
“Yes,” the former navigator muttered, finding his voice. “I’m an American.”
“Where were you taken prisoner?”
“Back in April of 1942 I flew off a carrier, the U.S.S. Hornet, in a B-25 with a guy named Jimmy Doolittle,” he said. “We bombed Tokyo.”
The soldier stared at him in disbelief. “Hell, those guys were all executed years ago,” he said, turning to the others. “You want to watch him, he’s out of his head.”
“No, I’m not,” Nielsen protested, his voice stronger. “There’s three more of them right down the hall here, too, that are with me. We’ve been kicked around from Japan, through Shanghai, through Nanking, and now we’re up here. Who are you guys?”
“The war’s over,” the soldier said. “Let’s go home.”
The soldiers loaded the raiders into a truck and evacuated them to the Grand Peking Hotel, offering them their first real meal in years. “A smiling little Chinese caterer brought us four lovely, heaping plates of Irish stew and nothing ever tasted so good,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “We sang, talked and ate all night.”
To the emaciated raiders, who had survived on little more than rice and water, even the soldier’s military rations proved a delicacy. “Lord, that was so good!” Hite said of the K rations. “The chocolate was the best thing.”
“To us,” added Nielsen, “Spam was like eating steak.”
One of the rescuers spotted DeShazer slipping food inside his clothes. “From now on, you don’t have to worry,” he told him. “You’ll get enough to eat.”
“What did you say?” the bombardier asked, realizing he had been in solitary confinement so long he had trouble comprehending.
“From now on,” the soldier repeated, only slower, “you’ll get enough to eat.”
The Magpie team radioed the spectacular news of the rescue of the raiders. “Have secured release of 4 Doolittle fliers who were charged with murder under Japanese law for Tokio Raid,” the message read. “They are now quartered Grand Peking Hotel and receiving best care possible.” The news quickly reverberated up the chain of command. “Theater desires any info which 4 recovered Doolittle fliers may have concerning fate of other 4 captured Doolittle fliers similarly charged with murder,” an August 23 message stated. “Kindly relay this and advise soonest.”
In a report filed two days later Nielsen, Hite, and DeShazer confirmed the deaths of Bill Dieter and Donald Fitzmaurice in the crash off the China coast as well as Bob Meder’s death in prison. The rescued raiders reported that the Japanese waterboarded them and then put them on trial for targeting children. “Hallmark, Farrow and Spatz sentenced separately and taken away,” the report stated. “This was last subjects saw them. Subjects believed these three executed.”
Hap Arnold would ultimately confirm those deaths in letters to the families, noting that he had prayed for the safe return of all the raiders. “There is nothing that one can say that will be of comfort to you I know, but one thing I hope you will always remember—the fire kindled in the heart of every American by your son and his fellow flyers led to the inevitable and conclusive defeat of Japan,” he wrote to Hallmark’s family. “The courage displayed by Lieutenant Hallmark throughout life was still evident when he faced his cowardly assassins. He died with honor and valor for his country.”
Though both Hite and Barr struggled with beriberi, Barr proved in far worse shape. The navigator’s weight had gone from 187 pounds to just 97, and his mind had begun to unravel. “He arrived in a state of stupor with weak pulse,” the medical report stated. “Physical exam showed oedema of both feet and wide spread loss of tactile sensations.” Doctors immediately gave him fifty milligrams of vitamin B1 and continued him on injections twice daily, supplemented by vitamin tablets. He was also administered a ferrous sulfate solution three times a day before meals, along with calcium lactate tablets afterward; in addition doctors gave him two transfusions of blood plasma. “Present condition,” the report concluded, “pulse improving but still weak, tactile sensations returning, knee jerks weakly present with reinforcement.”
Nielsen, Hite, and DeShazer flew to Chungking on August 24, but Barr remained too sick to be evacuated. Former prisoner of war Karel Mulder sat vigil at the navigator’s bedside, watching as Barr drifted in and out of consciousness. Barr’s hand would occasionally creep up Mulder’s shirt and grasp his long white beard. “I would then gently disengage his hand and put it down on his bed,” Mulder recalled, “but a little later his hand would creep up and get hold of my beard again.”
Jack Van Norman, the copilot of the C-47 transport that flew the others out of Peiping, wrote about the experience in his diary. “Brought back a load of Jap prisoners that were at Mukden. Three of them were Doolittle’s men. They have been prisoners since April 1942. Left them at Chungking & took the rest to Kunming. Really had a reception waiting for them at Chungking,” he wrote. “Most of them were in pretty bad shape, the Doolittle boys had been in solitary confinement most of the time. Went up to the club when we got back, a big time was had by all.”
News of the rescue of the Doolittle raiders ran on the front pages of newspapers across the nation, including the New York Times. Reporters now anxiously awaited the chance to interview the fliers, who sat for a press conference in Chungking soon after arriving in a small room at the headquarters that overlooked the sluggish Chia-ling River. “The three men were so weak from malnutrition that they staggered when they walked down the gangplank of the C-47 transport that brought them here,” wrote a reporter for United Press. “They were assisted to the ground.”
“They looked at first glance,” noted an Associated Press reporter, “as if they had never smiled nor ever would smile again—but they did.”
The raiders recalled details of the attacks on Tokyo and Nagoya, which now seemed like old news in a war that was finally over. Hite nervously fingered his throat, his voice so low reporters struggled to hear him.
“It’s good to get some GI food into your belly after that hollow feeling,” DeShazer told reporters.
“I feel that I’m an American again,” added Nielsen, who found a message waiting for him in Chungking from his wife, Thora. “He was a different man,” one reporter noted, “after he read it.”
General Wedemeyer fired off a telegram to Doolittle with the news of the rescue. “Three members of your Tokyo raid have been recovered. They are Lt. Nielsen, Lt. Hite and Sgt. DeShazer. Are now in Chungking leaving tomorrow for Kunming and then home,” Wedemeyer wrote. “They wish to be remembered to you.”
Hite, Nielsen, and DeShazer returned to the United States at 12:45 a.m. on September 4 and checked into Walter Reed General Hospital for an exam. The emaciated airmen had gained on average one pound a day since their rescue. There were other issues as well. After forty months without a toothbrush, Nielsen had to endure nineteen fillings. The raiders drew years of back pay, which totaled $8,832.91 for Nielsen, $7,547.80 for Hite, and $5,571.16 for DeShazer. The War Department put out a press release two days later, condensing three years of horror into just three pages. The raiders then sat for another press conference. “Their gaunt and prematurely aged faces,” wrote a New York Times reporter, “bore silent witness to the suffering and privation they endured.”
As the three men improved, Barr continued to unravel, believing his rescue was really just a ruse. “I was convinced that the whole thing was a Jap trick,” he later wrote. “That this was some new form of torture.” When he recovered physically, the Army flew him to Kunming on September 12, but Barr’s suspicions followed. “I was a bed patient in the hospital; I saw no one I knew,” he wrote. “A voice kept telling me this was a trick and to be careful. Even the hospital seemed like a prison.”
Barr suffered a breakdown a few days after his arrival, described in a nurse’s report. “Awoke suddenly at 2 a.m. Jumped out of bed screaming,” the report stated. “Restrained by three men. Gritted teeth and uttered animal-like sounds with occasional threats to his ‘torturers.’” The outburst landed Barr in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. “All my past suspicions and doubts were now confirmed,” he later said. “The barren room, the bars on the window, the occasional face at a slot in the locked door, and the solitary confinement spelled prison as far as I was concerned. I lay there a long time thinking things over and decided that I would pretend to go along with anything my captors were trying to make me do—but I would try to escape when the opportunity arose.”
Barr saw his chance when a medical corpsman escorted him across the tarmac to a waiting C-47 for the flight out in October. He could see the distant mountains unobscured by towering fences and walls that for more than three years had defined his life and caged him like an animal. Barr felt his adrenaline soar; his freedom finally at hand. He broke free of the corpsman and ran, his feet carrying him toward the horizon.
An unseen blow knocked him unconscious. Barr awoke in a straitjacket in the back of a transport plane. His suspicions only deepened when he reached the Calcutta hospital. “I was regaining some strength,” he later wrote, “but I still had those horrible nightmares and with them the persistent notion that the Japs had concocted some fiendish trick which would be made clear eventually.”
Barr had spent his captivity with Hite, Nielsen, and DeShazer, all of whom were now gone. He scanned the faces of the doctors, nurses, and other patients, looking for anyone familiar. “Why don’t I see someone I know,” he asked himself.
“This is a trick, another Jap trick,” an inner voice warned him. “Pretty soon you’ll see you are still a prisoner.”
Barr arrived at San Francisco’s Letterman General Hospital on October 12. He carried no medical records or even identification and struggled to answer the admittance clerk’s basic questions. The frustrated clerk finally summoned an orderly.
“Show the lieutenant to a room and get him some pajamas.”
The orderly escorted Barr to a room with two beds, a nightstand, and a chair. “Take your clothes off,” the orderly told him. “Put these pajamas on.”
Barr did as told, and the orderly left him alone. The navigator’s earlier fears now returned. This was no hospital, he believed, but another prison. Mentally and physically exhausted, Barr could no longer take it. He spied a pocketknife on the nightstand and picked it up, flicking open the blade. Barr plunged the knife into his chest. To his shock he felt no pain nor did he bleed much. He looked out his second-floor window, contemplating jumping, but realized he was not high enough. Barr found a heating lamp and ripped off the cord, fashioning a noose. He slid a chair under the overhead light fixture and climbed up. Barr tied the noose to the light and slipped it around his neck, careful to tighten it up. He kicked the chair out from under him.
Barr felt his head snap, and then he crashed to the floor as glass, metal, and sparks rained down on him. A report five days later noted that the Air Transport Service had failed to classify Barr as a disturbed mental patient. “The administrative failure,” the report stated, “almost meant this individual’s life.” Doctors ordered Barr transferred to Schick General Hospital in Clinton, Iowa, a three-day train ride he made in a straitjacket. “He will require maximum care en route,” his doctor’s report noted. “Unless this is observed he can be counted upon to injure himself.”
Orphaned at a young age, Barr had been cared for in part by a social worker, Eleanor Towns, who had spent the weeks since the war’s end working the phones trying to find him. She finally located Barr in Iowa and alerted his sister, Grace Maas, who visited him along with her husband, Bill, and close friend Betty Alexander. The familiar faces of his friends and family proved the healing tonic he so desperately needed. “I knew then it was true,” Barr wrote. “I knew I was free. I knew that the horror was over.”
Eleanor Towns had likewise reached out to Doolittle during her frantic search. Once she located Barr, she relayed the information to the general, who promptly visited. On a walk across the hospital grounds, Barr recounted the horrors of his forty months in prison to the man who had led him over Japan. “He tried to tell me everything he could. He was hesitant at first, but then the tears flowed and the words began to pour out,” Doolittle recalled. “Catharsis was obviously what was needed.”
Barr’s problems persisted. He told Doolittle he had not seen a doctor since his arrival. He likewise had no uniforms or money, even though he was entitled to years of back pay. Doolittle was shocked—then outraged. “The last of my Tokyo Raiders to come home needed help,” he later wrote, “and I was going to see that he got it.”
Doolittle marched to the hospital commander’s office. “I unloaded Doolittle’s worst verbal fury on his head. I won’t repeat what I said because it would burn a hole in this page,” he later wrote. “I will say that George was quickly outfitted in a new uniform, complete with the ribbons he didn’t know he had earned, and was given a check for over $7,000 in back pay, and orders promoting him to first lieutenant. Best of all, he was seen immediately by a psychiatrist and began the slow road back to recovery.”
Doolittle’s fury reverberated at the highest levels of the Army Air Forces, which soon transferred Barr to Pawling Air Force Convalescent Center, on Long Island. Brigadier General Malcolm Grow, the air surgeon, promised to personally update Doolittle. “I have instructed our facility at Pawling to inform me as soon as Captain Barr arrives so that I can in turn inform you,” Grow wrote in a letter to Doolittle. “I plan to keep myself informed of Captain Barr’s condition and progress so that we can be sure that everything possible is being done to promote his recovery.”
Before he left Schick General Hospital that afternoon Doolittle asked Barr whether he remembered his promise aboard the Hornet to throw a party for all the raiders.
“Yes, sir,” Barr answered, “I do.”
“Well, George, we never had that party because you and the rest of the fellows couldn’t make it. But I’m going to keep that promise. The whole gang is invited to be my guests in Miami on my birthday,” Doolittle told Barr. “I want you to come. I’ll send an airplane for you.”