At O’Donnell the American and Filipino troops were segregated. By now there were fewer than ten thousand American soldiers, and at first they began dying at a rate of about thirty to fifty per day. There was no medicine except for what the surgeons had managed to bring with them and this quickly ran out. “The camp became one vast sewer, foul and stinking. Clouds of flies buzzed everywhere: in the latrines, where they dropped their eggs in teeming filth; on the faces of those in coma, rimming their lips and drinking from their half-open eyes; over open, dripping ulcers of arm and leg; in filth-soaked clothing. They settled in an almost solid mass on the rice buckets as they were loaded by shovel from the steaming kawalis[open kettles], refusing to rise as they were waved away by KPs. Eating became a tricky maneuver; one hand rapidly shoveling rice from the mess kit into mouth while the other moved back and forth over a rag with which the rice in the mess kit was kept covered.”18
This last description was written by an army physician named Captain Alfred Weinstein, who goes on, “Men standing quietly in the chow or water line toppled over dead. Others straddling the slit trenches slithered into their fecal graves. Still others struggling back from a work detail would silently lie down on their filth-covered pallets and die. On scraps of paper the medics copied the serial numbers of the dead which had been painted on gaunt chests with the pitifully tiny supply off iodine husbanded on the long, long road from Bataan. If the Angel of Death ever had a caldron of victims ready for him, it was in Camp O’ Donnell during these first twelve weeks after the surrender. Why all of them didn’t die remains a mystery to those of us who watched and tried to help make their last death agonies less painful. The death toll rose—fifty, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred lifeless skeletons to be buried a day—until it reached a peak of five hundred and fifty.”19 The Japanese had by now captured and inventoried the vast stores of American medicines from the hospitals on Bataan but none of this was forthcoming to the diseased and dying men in O’Donnell; the Japanese used it for themselves.
There are enough recorded stories of this sort to fill dozens of books, but the picture so far is clear enough: the Japanese had little or no humane concerns regarding their disarmed and helpless charges. One reason as to why was, as mentioned, that the Japanese never ratified or agreed with the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Another was answered later, at the war crimes trial of General Masaharu Homma, which was that while the Japanese had expected to have prisoners after the fall of Bataan, they had expected only about 40,000—about half of what they got—and had made no provisions for so many men and didn’t bother to do so afterward. As to the Death March itself, General King had offered to transport the American and Filipino prisoners to whatever point the Japanese designated in U.S. Army trucks, but the Japanese refused; they had little transportation of their own and wanted to utilize whatever they had captured to move their own troops. Finally, the arrival of the ever ubiquitous Colonel Tsuji, of the Singapore Chinese massacres, may have had something to do with it.
It was said that after Tsuji came to the Philippines he became even more of a rogue officer, using his position as director of war planning to dictate recommendations and even orders to his superiors as though, through him, they came directly from Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo. It was said that he considered Homma weak and tried to undermine his authority and get him fired. It was said, too, that Tsuji “convinced several admiring officers on [Homma’s] staff that this was a racial war and that all prisoners in the Philippines should be executed: Americans because they were white colonialists and Filipinos because they had betrayed their fellow Asians.” To that end, it was then said that from Tsuji many Japanese commanding officers had received some kind of indirect order to “kill all prisoners and those offering to surrender.” One officer, it was said, Major General Torao Ikuta, refused to obey this order unless he received it in writing.*20
All this might be quite true; still, it does not explain the barbaric and heartless behavior of so many individual Japanese guards and soldiers, or their officers, who should have known better. It is one thing to execute people; it is another to torture and brutalize them beforehand. It has also been mentioned by way of excuse that the typical Japanese soldier was himself brutalized by his own officers and thus was hardened to brutality.
Listen again to our defiant poet-lieutenant Henry Lee.
An Execution
Red in the eastern sun, before he died
We saw his finting hair; his arms were tied.
There by his lonely form, ugly and grim,
We saw an open grave, waiting for him.
We watched him from our fence, in silent throng,
Each with fervent prayer, “God make him strong.”
They offered him a smoke, he’d not have that,
Then at his captor’s feet he coldly spat,
He faced the leaden hail, his eyes were bare;
We saw the tropic rays glint in his hair.
What matter why he stood, facing the gun?
We saw a nation’s pride, there in the sun.21
While all this dreadfulness was going on in the Philippines, eleven days out in the far North Pacific the carrier U.S.S. Hornet rendezvoused with Admiral Halsey’s Enterprise task force, which had left Pearl Harbor several days earlier to conduct Colonel Doolittle’s Tokyo raiding force. Five days later, on April 17, the two carriers were within Japanese home waters. The bombs and ammunition had been loaded, gas tanks topped off, last-minute checks made. Doolittle gave his final instructions, which included, “Under no circumstances [are we] to bomb the emperor’s palace.” Also, he gave them a last chance to drop out. “No one did.” Then snags began to develop. At three A.M. on the eighteenth, the Enterprise flashed a message: TWO ENEMY SURFACE CRAFT SIGHTED. Radar on the carrier had picked up Japanese ships about four miles away. The task force immediately went to general quarters and swung north to keep from being spotted. By dawn a forty-knot gale had blown up and the seas were mountainous. The Enterprise sent up patrol planes, which soon spotted other Japanese ships; what initial intelligence had not revealed was that the Japanese had established an early-warning picket line of fishing ships approximately seven hundred miles offshore. The task force was running into them now, more than two hundred miles away from their designated launch point.22
Suddenly, at six-thirty A.M., the cruiser Nashville roared to life with her big guns. People on the other ships ran to the sides to see what was going on. Less than two miles away was a seventy-ton Japanese picket ship. The jig was up now; if they could see it, certainly it had seen them. Radio scanners were picking up messages in Japanese code; obviously the presence of the task force was being reported. The Japanese picket would have to be sunk, but this was easier said than done. In thirty-foot swells, the ship was bobbing so much that it took 934 six-inch shells before one finally hit. One of the Japanese survivors who was fished out of the water told of how he had spotted the American task force and ran to his captain’s quarters to report “two beautiful Japanese carriers” passing by. The captain went topside and after taking a look said to the seaman, “Yes, they are beautiful, but they are not ours.” Then, according to the sailor, the captain “returned to his cabin and shot himself in the head.”23
Here was an awful predicament. The carriers had been expected to get the raiding force inside of five hundred miles from Japan, but they were still eight or nine hours away from their launching point. The Japanese picket ship had reported their presence and Japanese bombers were certainly being scrambled at this moment. Fuel for the B-25s had been calculated down to the last drop to carry the planes across Japan and on to China. But if they launched now the planes might run out of gas; almost worse, instead of arriving over the Japanese cities at night, when they would be fairly safe from Japanese antiaircraft and fighter attack, they would arrive in broad daylight. The decision was agonizing, but Doolittle made it instantly. Word blared over the Hornet’s loudspeaker system: “Army pilots, man your planes!”
The Hornet immediately became a hive of activity. From below, sailors lugged up hundreds of five-gallon jerricans of aviation gasoline to give each plane a boost in fuel capacity. Doolittle warned his pilots to make sure someone punctured holes in the the cans before tossing them out, so that they would not leave a trail in the ocean leading back to the carriers. The twin engines were started and revved up; the startled army pilots, some of whom had been shaving, others eating breakfast, dropped everything and got their gear together. By eight A.M. Halsey, on the Enterprise, flashed a message over to the Hornet: LAUNCH PLANES X TO COL DOOLITTLE AND GALLANT COMMAND GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU. Watching the planes taking off, Halsey called it “one of the most courageous deeds in military history.”24
Officers and crew on the Hornet gaped in breathless consternation as the first plane, Doolittle’s, started down the runway. The carrier was dipping and bobbing so much in the thirty-foot seas that Doolittle described it as “like taking off on a moving see-saw.” At the far end of the flight deck a launch chief was waving a checkered flag in a circle, faster and faster, telling Doolittle to keep revving his engines, higher and higher. Then, timed as daintily as a minuet, when the bow dipped into a huge wave he signaled for Doolittle to release the brakes and put full speed on the throttle. The fully loaded bomber lumbered down the deck, its left wing sticking out over the side, and, just as the bow rose again from the wave trough, went airborne. Lieutenant Ted Lawson, piloting Ruptured Duck, was seventh in line; he remembered, “We watched him like hawks, wondering what the wind would do to him, and whether he could get off in that little run toward the bow. If he couldn’t, we couldn’t. He had yards to spare. He hung his ship almost straight up on its props, until we could see the whole top of the B-25.” Huge cheers reverberated throughout the Hornet and the other American ships.25
A takeoff by a 25,000-pound plane in such a short space would have been impossible except from an aircraft carrier. By plowing ahead at full speed—nearly thirty-five miles an hour at that small length of ship—into the teeth of the gale-force wind, the Hornet was giving the bombers’ wings double extra lift, the aerodynamic factor that allows planes to leave the ground or, in this case, the deck. The rest of Doolittle’s squadron took off without serious incident until the turn of the last plane, Bat Out of Hell. She was revving high and her props were spinning in a blur when one of the sailors assigned to remove the restraining ropes slipped on the soaking deck and was sucked into the Bat’s propeller. It chopped off his arm, but the horrified airmen on the Bat took off anyway, following their fellows toward the empire of Japan.
Five and a half hours later Doolittle’s bombers, flying at treetop level, began to cross the coast of Japan. People in fishing boats and crop fields smiled and waved up at them. As the Americans neared Tokyo it was a strange, almost surreal feeling to spot the snowcapped peak of Mount Fuji, just as Commodore Perry had first done ninety years earlier. Now bicyclers and children looked up and waved at them; many assumed the B-2Ss were some kind of new Japanese airplane. The citizens of Tokyo had just experienced an air-raid drill that morning, and most people thought this had something to do with it. Soon the American fliers began to see flights of Japanese warplanes, but the warplanes took no notice of them. Just as the Japanese had at Pearl Harbor, Doolittle’s fliers were using Tokyo radio to home in on the city. And just as at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were expecting nothing more than another lovely spring day. They were taken completely by surprise. Then the bombs began to fall.
There wasn’t a whole lot of damage with only 32,000 pounds of bombs dropped on a city like Tokyo, whose eight million inhabitants were spread out in an area the size of Los Angeles. But damage was done. Oil refineries, electrical plants, steel mills, railroad centers, port facilities, airplane factories—all would take hits. Slowly but steadily the Japanese antiaircraft cannon began to come to life; flak exploded near the planes but they were flying so low and fast that it was generally ineffective. The last planes to go in saw flames and smoke belching up all over the city, but by now the Japanese antiaircraft fire was thick and the skies were filling with dozens of enemy fighter planes. But once the B-25s had dropped their payloads, their speed picked up dramatically and the Japanese pursuit planes were no match for them.
Right in the middle of all this the Japanese dictator, Prime Minister General Tojo, was riding in a small official plane that was trying to land at the Mito Aviation School on the far side of Tokyo, where he had intended to conduct an inspection. When his plane descended toward the runway, one of Doolittle’s B-2Ss “roared up on its right side and flashed by without firing a shot.” Tojo’s secretary, an army colonel, reported that the plane was “queer looking.”26
At the U.S. embassy, where diplomats and their staffs were being kept prisoner until they could be exchanged for Japanese diplomats in the United States, there was divided opinion as to whether the attack was a real one. When, going out on the roof, they discovered that it was true, Ambassador Joseph Grew reported, “We were all very happy and proud in the embassy and the British told us that they drank toasts all day to the American fliers.”27 The wife of the American naval attache recognized the planes and said to a friend, “Those planes are American bombers and I bet you that Lieutenant Jurika is in one of them.” She was wrong, but not by much. Jurika, who had spent years in Tokyo as naval attache, was now Lieutenant Commander Jurika, the intelligence officer aboard the Hornet, who had briefed Doolittle’s pilots on what they might expect if they were shot down and captured by the Japanese.28
Jurika’s remarks had not been comforting. He informed the pilots that in the skies over Tokyo alone, “military intelligence had determined that they would be greeted by three hundred 75mm anti-aircraft guns and five hundred Japanese planes” and that “if they were captured dropping bombs on Japan the chances of their survival would be awfully slim; very, very slim. I figured they would be, first of all, paraded through the streets as Exhibit A, and then tried by some kind of kangaroo court and probably publicly beheaded.”29
In any case, now that the raid had been successfully carried out without loss, the most serious part of the mission began—escape. Authorities in Washington had prearranged, or so they thought, for a landing field about seventy miles inland from the coast, still in Chinese Nationalist hands, to be prepared to receive the bombers. It would broadcast a homing beacon, be lit up for a possible night landing, and have on hand enough aviation gasoline to refuel the planes so that they could continue on to the Nationalist capital of Chungking, far into the interior of China. There the bombers would be turned over to the American air forces in China and the pilots picked up by planes flying from India and returned, via the western route, to the United States.
It did not work out that way; their luck had been too good to last. The weather began to turn and rain squalls set in. There was no beacon broadcast from the Chinese airfield, and neither was it lighted. Since the thing was in a valley flanked by steep mountains, locating it would be impossible. More ominous, the pilots would soon be approaching large mountain ranges and the maps they had were faulty. On one map, for instance, the altitude of a peak would be given as 5,000 feet; on another the same peak would be measured at 10,000 feet. At about eight-thirty P.M. they began to spot the first islands off the China coast. They had been in the air a full twelve hours and now the only chance for survival was either to fly down on the deck and try to find a spot to land in the fast-approaching darkness or to fly up high on instruments, hoping to get above the jagged peaks, and when the gas was almost gone to bail out and take their chances. Some took the first option, most took the second, and one plane whose gas situation was so critical that an escape to China became impossible veered far north and managed to land in Vladivostok, Russia, despite what Uncle Joe Stalin had said.
Lieutenant Ted Lawson piloting Ruptured Duck, who had so anxiously watched Doolitte’s takeoff from the Hornet, decided to try a landing on an empty beach. But just as he was coming in both en
gines quit and the plane smashed into the water some hundred yards offshore, “with the most terrifying noise I have ever heard.” Lawson, his copilot, and his navigator were hurled through the sturdy Plexiglas windshield. The bombardier was also thrown, headfirst, from his position in the nose cone. Lawson awoke from the impact still strapped into his seat under ten or fifteen feet of water. At first he thought he was dead; then he managed to unbuckle his straps and “drifted up off the seat and started to the surface.”
Lawson was more or less paralyzed but his life belt and the big waves carried him to the beach. It was pouring rain. He managed to stand but his legs were numb. He put his hand to his mouth and realized that his lip had been cut clear through to the chin, “so that the skin flapped over and down.” His upper teeth were bent in and, when he put his thumbs into his mouth to push them out, “they broke off in my hands.” So did his bottom teeth. His navigator, Dean Davenport, came walking down the beach, took a look, and said, “God damn! You’re really bashed open. Your whole face is pushed in.” And that wasn’t the worst of it.30
Doolittle, meantime, had chosen the second option—going high and bailing out when the engines started to sputter. Visibility was zero and it was dark when they started bailing out of the plane. Doolittle was the last one out; he pulled his rip cord and began floating down into he knew not what: mountain peak, river, forest, or the waiting arms of Japanese soldiers. In fact he landed in the soggy mess of a rice paddy, “in a not-too-fragrant mixture of water and ‘night soil.’” He looked around, saw a light, got up, and knocked on the door of some kind of farmhouse, shouting, “Lushu hoo megwafugi,” which they had been taught aboard the Hornet by Lieutenant Commander Jurika meant, “I am an American.” There was some rustling inside the house and then he heard “the sound of a bolt sliding into place. The light went out and there was dead silence,” leaving Doolittle standing there in the rainy Chinese night in his stinking uniform. For this he had come more than two thousand miles.31