Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (54 page)

Doolittle’s men disembarked from the C-47 that afternoon and were escorted to the American military mission, a small outpost located on a terraced hilltop. The aviators dined that night with Brigadier General John Magruder, the outgoing chief of the American military mission to China, who told them to expect some good news in the morning. Around 9 a.m. on April 30 Bissell, Magruder, and his staff gathered with the twenty raiders. Bissell congratulated the airmen for the successful mission and shared the appreciation of the president, General Marshall, and General Arnold. He then announced that each man had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal first awarded to Charles Lindbergh in honor of his solo flight across the Atlantic.

“We were all astounded,” Ken Reddy wrote in his diary. “For a minute it was as if someone had belted me one in the stomach,” Bill Bower noted in his. “I couldn’t breathe very well,” recalled Ross Greening. “It was the biggest thrill of my life.”

The Chungking-based officers invited the raiders to celebrate that night at a house by the river. Engineer George Larkin cut up his parachute and made scarves, giving them out to the party’s hosts. Wartime inflation had driven the price of a bottle
of booze up as high as eighty dollars, forcing the officers to cater the party with bathtub gin made by a local ice company, a fact that didn’t dissuade navigator Eugene McGurl, who wrote in his diary, “Started drinking wine (Chinese variety & potent) about 4:00 p.m. & capped off the evening with Chungking Gin—arguably a highly explosive mixture.”

Chiang Kai-shek invited the raiders to lunch the next day, a scene described by Reddy in his diary: “His home was very lovely inside, having indirect lighting of a Chinese design, soft modernistic chairs, and heavy padded cushions without backs to sit on, individual silver ashtrays, herring bone hardwood floors, and a soft glowing fireplace.” The home’s elegant furnishings contrasted with the battered and bruised raiders. “I’ll bet it was the motliest bunch of men who ever dined with the ruler of any country,” Bower wrote in his diary. “Coveralls, leather jackets, several ties, and everything containing a varied assortment of spots and mud.”

Madame Chiang Kai-shek welcomed the airmen, stealing all the attention. Born in Shanghai to a wealthy family, May-ling Soong started boarding school at age ten at Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia, the world’s first chartered women’s college. She went on to study at Wellesley College near Boston, majoring in English literature and wowing faculty with what the press later called her “Scarlett O’Hara accent.” The forty-four-year-old had returned to China after graduating in 1917, able to speak English better than her native tongue. Beautiful, slender, and often dressed in tight long gowns, Madame Chiang married the generalissimo in 1927, forming a powerful political partnership. General Joseph Stilwell found her far more impressive than her husband, describing her in his diary as “a clever, brainy woman.” “Direct, forceful, energetic, loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history,” he wrote. “Can turn on charm at will. And knows it.”

The raiders loved her. “The Madame is the most impressive character I have ever had the privilege to meet,” Reddy wrote. “She speaks excellent English, and better still she has control of the American slang; she’s brilliant, witty and
beautiful
.”

The airmen feasted on a multicourse lunch that began with a delicious onion soup, followed by potatoes and cold ham and beef. After that came a dish of chicken, green peas, and noodles. For dessert the aviators enjoyed lemon pie and ice cream, the only time the men savored the sweet frozen treat in China. They washed
it down with cups of American coffee. “It was,” Reddy wrote, “our best meal in China.”

The generalissimo arrived midway through lunch. Speaking through an interpreter, he toasted first the airmen and then Roosevelt and victory. Compared with his wife’s, Chiang’s appearance was unremarkable. “He entered the room, apparently harassed and hurried, and made a very short speech,” Greening recalled. “Then he came over, shook hands with me as the ranking representative of our group, and left.”

After lunch the raiders adjourned to the living room with Madame Chiang. Reddy asked her to sign the map in the front of his diary and his Short Snorter Dollar, but Colonel Bissell intervened to halt the autographs seekers. Bissell presented a pair of American wings to Madame Chiang, who confessed that she would also like to have a flight cap, prompting several of the raiders to hand them over. The airmen soon realized that it would probably be best for Doolittle to send a new one once he returned home. “In order to get the size she tried Capt. Greening’s on, and then mine,” Reddy wrote in his diary. “The latter fit OK.” Greening presented her with a set of Air Forces and Seventeenth Bombardment Group insignia. “I had a bit of an embarrassing time,” he later wrote, “fumbling around trying to find somewhere to pin them on her.”

The airmen returned to their quarters at the mission that afternoon, only to be summoned again around 9:30 p.m. to the drawing room. They received instructions on how to behave moments before Madame Chiang arrived with an entourage of local officials. Reddy noticed she wore the wings the men had presented her earlier in the day “in a conspicuous place over her heart.” Camera flash bulbs popped and motion picture cameras rolled as she presented the raiders with distinguished service medals. She then posed for pictures with the airmen, standing in front of Reddy.

“This should make my girl at home jealous,” the pilot mumbled to the aviator next to him.

“Blonde or brunette?” Madame Chiang asked.

She also presented each airman with a personal letter, thanking him for the raid. “The entire Chinese people are grateful to you,” she wrote. “May you continue to vindicate freedom and justice so that by your efforts a happier and more unselfish world society will evolve when victory is ours.”

The raiders were thrilled by her graciousness
. “Praise be it. Red Letter day,” Bower wrote in his diary. “We all never expected anything like this and surely know of others who have sacrificed much more often in this war for no recognition.”

The airmen used the downtime in Chungking to unwind from the adventures of the previous few weeks. Bower explored the chaotic city but got lost, which he noted in his diary was “almost as bad as being lost in the Chinese mountains.” He managed to buy a bottle of vodka and three orange squeezes, which set him back eighty-five dollars. Joseph Manske spent much of his time on his back, recovering from malaria, while Reddy visited a doctor to x-ray his banged-up knee and stitch up the cut on his head.

The first group of twenty aviators shipped out for India on May 3, piling into the same C-47 cargo plane that had just delivered Doolittle, Jack Hilger, and nineteen more raiders to Chungking. The second group of airmen had followed the same course as the previous ones, traveling by train, bus, and plane to the wartime capital. Doolittle had left Davy Jones and Brick Holstrom in Chuchow to await any stragglers and bring them along later. He also sent for John Birch, requesting that the missionary oversee the burial of Leland Faktor.

Birch held a memorial for Faktor near Chuchow—the same afternoon Doolittle touched down in Chungking—attended by thirteen of the raiders. Birch tried to use the $2,000 in Chinese currency Doolittle left him to buy a burial plot, but the Chinese informed him that international law prohibited the sale, offering instead to lease a plot for free for a hundred years. “Shall accept,” Birch cabled Chungking, “if not otherwise instructed.” The country magistrate at Sheui Chang donated the coffin, though air raids slowed preparation of the grave and stone for two weeks. At 5 p.m. on May 19 near the military headquarters at Wan Tsuen—and with two hundred of the base personnel in attendance—Faktor was buried with military honors provided by the Chinese air force.

Doolittle meanwhile arrived in Chungking to learn that his earlier fears were unfounded. Arnold had cabled a congratulatory message on April 22. “On your truly wonderful and magnificent flight I wish to congratulate you and all members of your organization in behalf of myself personally and for the entire Army Air Forces,” the general wrote. “Fully realized are the conditions unforeseen which arose to make your task an almost impossible one. Your achievement
is made all the more glorious by the fact that you surmounted these unforeseen conditions.”

A message from General Marshall also awaited him. “The President sends his thanks and congratulations to you and your command for the highly courageous and determined manner in which you carried out your hazardous mission and for the great service you have rendered to the nation and to the Allied cause,” Marshall cabled. “Your nomination as a brigadier general goes to the Senate this morning. To me your leadership has been a great inspiration and fills me with confidence for the future.”

Doolittle had learned on April 28 that Arnold had promoted him to brigadier general. He would for the second time in his career skip a rank, a promotion he knew would only reinforce the idea of some of his contemporaries that he was Arnold’s fair-haired boy. Doolittle did not have any stars to wear, so Clayton Bissell, who also had just been promoted to general, gave him a set. “He offered me a swig from his high-priced Scotch whiskey in celebration and I took a large gulp, which he didn’t appreciate,” Doolittle recalled. “He estimated my gulp was worth about $80.” Doolittle’s men were thrilled at the news of his promotion, as Hilger recorded in his diary: “We’re all as happy as if each one of us had been made a general too.”

The rest of the raiders received the Distinguished Flying Cross, and, like the earlier group, met with Chiang. Doolittle later had the cap he wore over Tokyo cleaned and then gold braid sewn into it before he sent it to Madame Chiang. “My second in command, Jack Hilger, received the highest Chinese decoration,” he recalled. “Then when I walked in, Chiang and his wife looked at each other and realized that something had gone wrong with the presentation ceremony—they didn’t have a decoration to give me. Chiang looked toward one of his highly decorated generals, approached him, and removed a beautiful decoration from around his neck. He then hung it on me. It is said that the Chinese are emotionless, but that general sure showed emotion when stripped of his medal by the Generalissimo!”

Doolittle’s copilot, Dick Cole, used his downtime in the Chinese capital to fire off a letter to his parents back home in Ohio. “I realize you are probably both worried and wondering as to my whereabouts and safety. The long silence on my part was imperative and someday you will know why,” he wrote. “It is pretty hard to write a letter without writing about your activities, but I gues
s it’s O.K. to tell you that I have had my first taste of combat and find it not too bad. ‘Lady Luck’ is still riding on my shoulder and I hope she stays there in the future.” Cole closed with an observation of how the raid had affected him and his views. “The last four weeks have vindicated my life-long opinion—that there is no place as good as the United States—No place.”

Each of the raiders who passed through Chungking sat down and completed a detailed report of the raid and its aftermath under the supervision of Colonel Merian Cooper, one of the Army Air Forces’s more colorful officers. A forty-eight-year-old former bomber pilot, Cooper was wounded in aerial combat behind enemy lines during World War I, suffering severe burns and sitting out the rest of the war in a German hospital. He recovered and flew volunteer missions against the Russians in the 1919–21 Polish-Soviet war, where in July 1920 he was shot down again and captured. Cooper managed to escape after ten months in prison, a feat that required him to slit the throat of a Russian soldier. Cooper’s thirst for exploration and adventure proved a natural fit in Hollywood—
The N
ew Yorker
dubbed him the “T. E. Lawrence of the movies”—where he went on to create the 1933 film classic
King Kong
. Like Doolittle, Cooper had remained in the Army Reserves, requesting foreign duty as soon as the war broke out.

As the debriefing officer for the raid, Cooper would ultimately sit down with fifty-nine of the raiders, including Doolittle. “I can remember you well—open neck, unshaved, dirty clothes, but still full of fire,” Cooper wrote in a 1971 personal letter to Doolittle. “You gave me the map I still have, marking where you thought your lost crews were, in your handwriting.” Hilger described the debriefing experience in his diary. “It seems that I have done nothing but write all day long,” he griped on May 5. “It has taken us longer to write the reports on this mission than to fly it.”

Doolittle departed May 5 for the United States flush with the one hundred dollars Cooper had lent him to cover any expenses, a debt the general repaid to Cooper’s wife in Alexandria, Virginia. “Had it not been for his kindness—and affluence, I would have had the Devil’s own time getting home,” Doolittle wrote her. “As it was, I arrived just about destitute.” Just before Doolittle left, Cooper made him a promise. “I told you I would do the best I could for all your men,” he later wrote to him. “I did.”

Armed with Doolittle’s map of where the missing crews likely were captured—and information provided by the generalissimo’s chief of intelligence and secret
police—Cooper proposed a rescue operation and requested $10,000 in gold coins for bribery. “I had used gold coins in my explorations in the 1920’s in Persia, Arabia, Siam, Abyssinia, etc., and found they worked magic when paper money meant nothing,” he wrote. “I felt gold coins would do the same in China and among the Japanese.”

Cooper outlined his plan to Bissell, who then gave him the go-ahead. “I told him that I would either bring back the prisoners alive, or I would not come back. I meant I would be dead. I did not intend to be captured and tortured by the Japanese and then executed,” Cooper later wrote to Doolittle. “If it was evident that I was going to be captured by the Japanese, I intended to kill myself; but I didn’t think this would happen. I felt quite confident I could bring out the Doolittle crew prisoners alive.”

The next morning, when Cooper went to retrieve the gold, Bissell told him the operation had been killed. Cooper never learned why, though it would haunt him for decades. “I was pretty broken up by the cancellation of my proposed rescue mission. I thought I was eminently qualified to carry it through successfully. After all, I had escaped from a Russian prison near Moscow—after ten months there—and walked over 200 miles, living in the open, in dangerous Communist country, stealing and begging food from the peasants, sleeping in the melting snow, and swimming over one hundred ice-cold streams and rivers,” he wrote years later to Doolittle. “I have never written the story of my escape, as it looks too fantastic and incredible. But I considered it more difficult than rescuing your men—but they didn’t let me.”