I don’t want revenge. I want peace.
—GEORGE BARR, MAY 13, 1946
RECOVERY WOULD PROVE DIFFICULT for the four former prisoners of war, who struggled after years of solitary confinement to readjust to life in civilization. The men often found themselves agitated and plagued by nightmares. “Lord, I was nervous and I kind of wanted to be alone. I think I was just sort of frightened of people,” Hite recalled. “We had been in that solitary confinement so long that I don’t know whether we wanted to see anybody or not. It had almost grown on us. Our people, at the time, didn’t know what to do with us, really. I think they tried to push us and treat us like everybody else, which was probably a good thing in a lot of ways. But they didn’t know the state of our minds or our psyche.” In an article published a few months after their release, Hite and DeShazer described their struggle to readjust. “We have memories we can express only to each other,” the men wrote. “They will be with us always.”
The raiders not only wrestled with their own adjustment to freedom after forty months in horrific prisons but also battled the guilt of having survived when their friends had not. Despite his own struggles Hite felt he owed the families of his fellow raiders the courtesy of telling them what he could. In an October letter to Dean Hallmark’s family in Dallas, Hite described the sham trial that had condemned his friends to death. “We never saw our buddies again,” he wrote of the sentencing in October 1942. “The Japs took us to the room in which our clothes were stored; there we found Dean’s clothing also the clothing of Spatz and Farrow. We were confused and struck by the indication, but nevertheless held to the theory that they had only been separated to another prison. Ourselves doomed to life in prisonment in solitary confinement it was hard to keep up our morale as we were entirely alone.”
Hite confessed that his grief, upon his release from prison and receiving the confirmation of the execution of his friends, had delayed his writing. He tried to remain upbeat in his five-page letter written on U.S. Army Air Forces stationery, noting that Hallmark and the others were heroes to a grateful nation. “Dean was a splendid example of American youth and courage, hoping until the very end and then his hopes justified in his faith in the God of us all. It is a matter of deep concern to me that your son, loved by millions, is gone. He was noble, courageous and an uplift to all of us in our moments of despair, knowing not what the Japs were going to do with us.” Hite concluded with a promise to come visit. “Neither Dean nor Meder or Farrow and Spatz are really gone,” he wrote. “I know they are justified in the sight of our God. I can see them now and they are there indelibly inscribed on the hearts of all our American people.”
Hite followed through with his plans to visit, sitting down with Hallmark’s parents in their home at 808 Wayne Avenue in Dallas, an address he would never forget. The conversation proved difficult.
“Why are you here and not my son?” Ollie Hallmark asked. Hite struggled to respond. “Those were answers,” he said, “that were sort of hard to come by.”
Hite likewise wrote a letter to Harold Spatz’s family in Lebo, Kansas. “I want to extend to you my deep felt sympathy and love for Harold,” he began. “I know that the uncertainty has been hard on you as it has been on my mother, as she did think that I was executed. I cannot understand why three members of our flight were executed except that it was the treacherous act of the bloody Japanese. We were all kept blind as to what the Japs intended to do with us. Sometimes the Japs would say we were all going to be executed and again that we would be kept alive but not allowed to return to our country; the pressure has been trying and the disappearance of Harold, Hallmark and Farrow a grief to us all.” Hite concluded by telling Spatz’s mother that her son had remained strong until the end. “I know they are now happy and at rest,” he wrote, “though it grieves us to know they are physically gone, they still live with us in spirit.”
Chase Nielsen likewise wrote to Bill Dieter’s mother in California, relaying the details of the Green Hornet’s violent crash in the Chinese surf, the injuries Dieter and Donald Fitzmaurice sustained, and the burial of the airmen the next day on the sandy knoll overlooking the beach. “Bill and Fitz were two simply grand fellows, and although we had not been acquainted very long we were all like brothers,” Nielsen wrote. “I have spent many hours in sorrow thinking of my dear departed friends. I know that you too Mrs. Dieter have been carrying a heavy burden. But I know the Gracious God who comforts all will help you to bear up under your load. I also pray that he bless you in every way and that he grant Bill the privilege of preparing a beautiful place of meeting and rest for all his loved ones in the Kingdom where we all will meet again.”
Nielsen gave the location of Dieter’s and Fitzmaurice’s graves to American forces in China in 1945. The Graves Registration bureau contacted him the next year, asking whether he would help find the remains. That spring Nielsen traveled back to that spot along the Chinese coast. Armed with shovels the men dug through the sand and found the wooden boxes the fliers had used to bury their friends four years earlier. “In each coffin with the remains,” Nielsen wrote Dieter’s mother, “was enough of their flying jackets left so as to identity each by the name plates.” May Dieter had grown close with Donald Fitzmaurice’s mother over the years as the women awaited word of what happened to their boys. The two mothers decided on a final request, which May Dieter outlined in a letter to Doolittle. The airmen had died together in the surf that night after the raid, and for the last four years they had lain side by side in graves in China. It would be a shame now to separate them. “Do you think,” she added, “it would be too much to ask to have them in Arlington?”
American investigators after the war set out on what might have first appeared a quixotic hunt to track down the remains of the executed fliers. Despite Tatsuta’s promise to the airmen that their ashes would be returned to the United States, the cremated remains of Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz languished in a Shanghai funeral parlor, where the Japanese had placed them on November 14, 1942. When the war ended, uniformed Japanese troops visited the funeral home, changing Hallmark’s name to J. Smith, Spatz’s name to E. L. Brister, and Farrow’s to H. E. Gande, a move designed to cover up the crime. A fellow prisoner and translator, Caesar Luis Dos Remedios, who worked with war crime investigators, located the remains. Though the Japanese had changed the names, Remedios discovered, no one had changed the birth dates, allowing investigators to link the ashes back to the raiders. Each box, nine inches long, nine wide, and twelve deep—covered by a flag—would serve as prosecution Exhibit C in the case of the United States of America versus Shigeru Sawada, Yusei Wako, Ryuhei Okada, and Sotojiro Tatsuta.
All that was left was to find the remains of Meder, who had died in Nanking on December 1, 1943. Captain Jason Bailey, a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation from San Francisco, visited Kiangwan in late September, accompanied by journalist Irene Kuhn. Guards had just invited the American investigators to enjoy a cup of green tea when Captain Maszumi Shimada appeared, clutching a small wooden box wrapped in a fine white silk. The silk was open at the top, and a label stenciled in black read, “USA Commissioned Officer’s Ashes.”
“These are Captain Meder’s ashes,” Shimada announced. “They have just arrived from Nanking. You will take them back to Shanghai with you, perhaps?”
Bailey was shocked. “None of us,” Kuhn later wrote, “was prepared for this.”
“Give the box to me,” Bailey ordered.
Shimada handed him the box, which he placed on his knees and stared down at silently. “I put out my hands,” Kuhn wrote. “Perhaps because I was a woman responding to some inner urging that, miraculously, this young man understood, he handed me the box without a word. I cradled it in my arms on my lap and bent my head to hide my face from the inquisitive Japanese around us. Not for worlds would I have let them see the tears that were in my eyes and that I was fighting desperately to hold back.”
The Japanese produced a second box, this one wrapped in unbleached muslin, which Bailey demanded opened. Shimada’s aide untied the muslin knot, opened the top, and handed the box to Bailey. Inside he found Meder’s personal effects.
“A book of traveller’s checks, $10 denomination each, Bank of America, San Francisco,” Bailey read, pulling the items out one by one.
“A personal check book, National Bank of Fort Sam Houston. Last check, according to the stub, made out to the U.S.S. Hornet Mess—for $17,” he said. “The stub just ahead of that shows he drew a check to the Midland Mutual Life Insurance Co. for $21.25—premium on his life insurance policy. That was on February 2, 1942.”
Bailey produced a membership card to the Round Up Room of the Temple Hotel in Pendleton, Oregon, the home of the Seventeenth Bombardment Group, as well as a Phi Kappa Tau fraternity card from Meder’s days at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He also found a compass, comb, and Social Security card. “There was a picture of a very pretty girl,” Kuhn wrote, “smiling out at us from the discolored paper in the mildewed leather case the young Lieutenant had carried with him until the last.”
The raiders’ remains were eventually brought back home. Harold Spatz was laid to rest at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Hallmark, Farrow, and Meder’s ashes were buried in Arlington. Herb Macia captured the scene in a letter to Hallmark’s mother after he laid roses from his own garden on his friend’s grave. “Dean is buried between Bob Meder and Bill Farrow,” he wrote. “Their graves lie under a beautiful tree which shades and protects them.”
With the war finally over and the guns now silent, America and its allies convened the International Military Tribunal of the Far East, the Pacific counterpart to the Nuremburg Trials, which prosecuted German political and military leaders for atrocities. This years-long legal process ultimately led to the investigation and prosecution of more than five thousand Japanese defendants, including some of those involved in the trial and execution of the Doolittle raiders. Authorities arrested Hideki Tojo and Shunroku Hata, the former commander the China Expeditionary Army, both of whom would stand trial for other war crimes. Hajime Sugiyama, the former Army chief of staff and vocal proponent of the airmen’s execution, shot himself days after the war ended. Prosecutor Itsuro Hata had also died; so had Chief Judge Toyoma Nakajo.
Authorities arrested Shigeru Sawada. Hata had ordered the former commander of the Thirteenth Expeditionary Army in China to appoint the military tribunal that prosecuted the airmen. Investigators likewise arrested tribunal judges Ryuhei Okada and Yusei Wako as well Sotojiro Tatsuta, the warden and executioner. The four defendants stood trial together at the Ward Road Jail in Shanghai in what prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel John Hendren Jr. told reporters would be an “open and shut case.” Opening statements began the morning of March 18, 1946. Unlike the case against the raiders, which had lasted barely half an hour, this one stretched on for nearly a month. Defendants were provided counsel, access to exhibits, and the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. Defense lawyers even flew to Tokyo to search out witnesses and collect evidence. The record of the proceedings along with exhibits would ultimately run to some 750 pages and include a wide range of testimony, from Hallmark’s cellmates at the Bridge House to a doctor who described Meder’s death of malnutrition and Japanese teachers who witnessed the raid. Court members even visited the cemetery where the raiders were shot.
Nielsen served as the prosecution’s star witness, noting in a letter to Doolittle how the defendants cringed when he entered the courtroom to testify. A photo of Tatsuta bowing to him would later run in newspapers nationwide. “I sit here with tears in my eyes,” Nielsen wrote, “when I think what has happened to the ones who were in the Jap prison camps, and feel that I want to do what little I can to help those who came back and to help prosecute those who were responsible for the executing of the others.” Nielsen testified for several days, recounting in detail the plans and training for the mission, Doolittle’s strict orders to avoid all nonmilitary targets as well as his personal recollections of the raid. The Green Hornet’s navigator then recounted in painful detail the torture and punishment he and the others suffered after their capture in China, from the beatings and waterboarding to their forced confessions.
George Barr contributed testimony from Schick General Hospital in Iowa, a forty-three-page transcript ultimately included in the record. Hite and DeShazer in Washington likewise provided a joint four-page affidavit. Doolittle sat for questions at the Pentagon, resulting in a three-page transcript for the record in which he denied that any of his men had intentionally targeted schools or hospitals, as the Japanese had claimed. “Crews were repeatedly briefed to avoid any action that could possibly give the Japanese any ground to say that we had bombed or strafed indiscriminately,” Doolittle testified. “Specifically, they were told to stay away from hospitals, schools, museums and anything else that was not a military target.” He did concede that Japan’s dense cities made it difficult to guarantee no civilian casualties. “It is quite impossible to bomb a military objective that has civilian residences near it without danger of harming the civilian residences as well,” Doolittle said. “That is a hazard of war.”
Prosecutor Robert Dwyer in his closing statement addressed the fallacy of the trial that had condemned some of the raiders to death and others to life in prison. “In all my life I have never seen, and I doubt whether I have even read, of any trial which was quite the mockery of justice that this one was,” he said. “The evil began when these men were placed before a tribunal, a tribunal of any kind, and secondly, once they were placed before it they had no more chance or opportunity of a fair and honest trial than I have with my right hand to stem the fall of Niagara’s waters, and these men having paid the supreme penalty, I say they stand here in spirit.” The prosecution asked the commission for the maximum punishment. “We have charged these men with the violations of the laws of custom and war,” he concluded. “We have proven it by a wealth of evidence and we close by asking for the death penalty against all four accused.”
The defense lawyers, in contrast, blamed the trial and execution of the raiders on officers higher up the chain of command as well as on Japan’s passage of the so-called Enemy Airmen’s Act. The defendants had simply followed orders. “Every detail was decided in Tokyo and the defendants in this case in their respective official capacity acted only mechanically,” Shinji Somiya argued. “They were nothing but the men of straw manipulated at the tip. They had entirely no freedom of will to do or not to do.” In his closing statement the lawyer begged the justices to show mercy, asking them to remember the words from the Bible’s book of Matthew: “I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.”
After deliberating for two days, the five-member commission decided to spare the lives of the defendants, agreeing that the men had only followed orders. “The offenses of each of the accused resulted largely from obedience to the laws and instructions of their Government and their Military Superiors,” the commission concluded. “They exercised no initiative to any marked degree. The preponderance of evidence shows beyond reasonable doubt that other officers, including high governmental and military officials, were responsible for the enactment of the Ex poste Facto ‘Enemy Airmen’s Law’ and the issuance of special instructions as to how these American Prisoners were to be treated, tried, sentenced and punished. The circumstances set forth above do not entirely absolve the accused from guilt. However, they do compel unusually strong mitigating considerations, applicable to each accused in various degrees.”
The commission sentenced Sawada, Okada, and Tatsuta each to five years of hard labor. Wako received nine years, the tribunal reasoning that since he had prior legal training he was in a better position to recognize the airmen’s bogus confessions, yet he had accepted them without question. War criminals who could have swung at the end of a rope would instead walk free in just a few years. Although unable to increase the punishments, the reviewing authority blasted the weak sentences in August 1946. “The Commission by awarding such extremely lenient and inadequate penalties committed a serious error of judgment,” the review found. “It is clear that when they found the accused guilty of the capital offenses of mistreatment and murder under the laws of war, the penalties should have been commensurate with such findings.”
Reporters who covered the trial noted that the defendants appeared impassive as the commission read the lenient sentences, even as the Japanese defense counsel wept with surprise. A member of the defense team, Moritada Kumashiro, wiped away tears before addressing the court. “On behalf of the Japanese Counsel, I would like to express my hearty thanks to this Commission to the fair and sympathetic verdict in the case,” Kumashiro said with a choked voice. “We deeply appreciate everything that has been done.” The punishment outraged Americans across the nation. “Have you any comments on leniency court martial showed Japanese murderers of your son. Please wire collect,” the managing editor of the Philadelphia Daily News cabled Hallmark’s parents in Texas. “We will be glad to print any criticism you wish to make.” A handwritten note in the Hallmark family files captured the anguish of the airman’s mother. “In my estimation the representatives of our country have fallen down in avenging the murder of our son. I am amazed at the light sentence given the murders. We have heard from people all over the nation and they feel the same,” she wrote. “This won’t ever be forgotten.”
Few were as outraged as Chase Nielsen, who had returned to China on a mission to seek justice for his friends. He promised Hallmark’s mother that he planned to protest the sentences with Doolittle, his senator, and even President Truman. “I thought if I went back to Shanghai to testify it would help but it looks as though I’ve been made a fool of,” he wrote. “I’ll do all I can Mrs. Hallmark as the death of my three buddies by execution and the loss of three more through the raid, means much to me and a 5 to 9 year sentence is not a just one.” Nielsen appeared to have calmed down almost two weeks later when he wrote to Dieter’s mother. “I am sorry justice could not see fit to even its sides for the Mothers and families of the three executed,” Nielsen wrote. “I feel I have done all in my power, and feel I have lost, but justice will be meted out some day yet.”
The four convicted Japanese landed in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison to serve their sentences, where the former general Sawada lobbied American officials to release Okada and Tatsuta, who he argued were only following his orders. The duo’s incarceration, he wrote, tormented his “heart day and night.” “Since this was the tribunal of the Japanese Army which I had ordered and summoned in accordance with the order from my superior,” Sawada wrote in 1949, “I should be responsible for all the consequences arising therefrom, and it has been a tremendous pain for me that my subordinates were punished for that matter in line with myself.” Sawada, Okada, and Tatsuta would walk free on January 9, 1950, having served a total of just 1,365 days.
Yusei Wako was found guilty again in December 1948, this time for overseeing the beheading of eight B-29 airmen in June 1945—he personally decapitated two—and for his assistance with the execution of eight others that August. The commission this time sentenced Wako to death, a punishment Douglas MacArthur commuted in July 1950 to life in prison at hard labor. Even then he would not serve his full term, but was paroled in 1956, serving just six months for each man he was convicted of helping kill. Wako’s prison record shows he spent most of that time crafting musical instruments and farming. On an application for clemency the prisoner who had helped kill twenty American airmen outlined a future career path that in all likelihood startled the review board. “I intend,” Wako wrote, “to become a lawyer, public prosecutor or a judge.”
WAR CRIME INVESTIGATORS likewise doggedly pursued former general Sadamu Shimomura, who had replaced Sawada as the commander of the Thirteenth Army on the eve of the raiders’ execution, reportedly personally signing the airmen’s death order. In December 1945, investigators orally requested that American authorities in Tokyo arrest him. General Douglas MacArthur’s staff refused. Not unlike other suspected war criminals whom American officials would prove reluctant to prosecute, Shimomura had become a valuable asset in postwar Japan. He served as the nation’s minister of war, working closely with American authorities to demobilize the army. He had given an important speech in October, publicly falling on the sword as he argued that Japanese military leaders must apologize for all of the military’s transgressions. “It is common knowledge now that extermination of militarism and the military clique is being voiced both at home and abroad,” he said. “Looking back on the past, this is only a natural consequence.”
To American investigators in China, none of this mattered. If Shimomura played a role in the execution of the raiders, he should be prosecuted. In a January 3 memo Lieutenant Colonel John Hendren Jr., an assistant staff judge advocate, argued that evidence showed Shimomura had replaced Sawada at the time of the execution and had even issued the instructions to Tatsuta for how the deaths should occur. It would be unfair to try only Sawada if both generals were culpable in the trial and execution. “It is believed that if permission is not given to try Shimomura that Sawada should not be tried,” Hendren argued. “If these two top Generals are left out of this case it will appear to the Military Commission and the public that we are attempting to hold junior officers for offenses which they were ordered to commit on command of higher authority.”
War crimes investigators filed a formal request for Shimomura’s arrest on January 11, 1946. MacArthur’s staff again refused, this time claiming the case would be considered from an “international standpoint.” Investigators filed a second arrest request on January 23 and followed up with a visit to Japan, arousing the international press. Now MacArthur’s staff had no choice but to allow the arrest of Shimomura, who was interned at Sugamo Prison on February 9, 1946. Rather than hand him over to stand trial in March alongside the other four defendants, MacArthur’s staff put up a fierce defense of the former general, tracking down hotel receipts and witnesses who might exonerate him. In the end, Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, fell back on the defense that Shimomura was simply following orders. “As the final decision for the execution of the fliers had been made by Imperial General Headquarters, Tokyo, on 10 October,” Willoughby wrote in a memo, “the signature of the Commanding General 13th Army on the execution order was simply a matter of formality.”
Willoughby’s argument, of course, was the same made by the other four defendants, yet the court still tried and convicted them. His long delay did in the end accomplish its goal. “The War Crimes mission in China is about to close,” Major Ralph Hinner wrote in September. “Further action by this Headquarters with respect to trial of General Shimomura is no longer possible. Accordingly, this Headquarters is not disposed to take any action in the case.” Willoughby personally oversaw the details of Shimomura’s secret release, which involved bypassing the required written instructions from the Japanese government as well as the stealth elimination of his name from the prison’s daily reports. A private sedan would pick him up at the prison and drive him to his home in Ichikawa at noon on March 14, 1947, before officials sent him away “to a quiet place for a few months.” The man who had allegedly inked his name to the execution order of Doolittle’s raiders in the end would never serve another day in jail. “It is directed,” orders stated, “that this release be given no publicity.”