Jake eagerly awaited his turn to bathe. He could hardly wait to get to the top of the stairs and into the bath. He tore off his uniform and climbed in. The bathwater enveloped him in a wave of pure luxury. What was even better, his body floated almost weightless in the water, bringing him relief from the pressure of the boils that had formed on his body in the past weeks. There was another thing he savored—being alone. The guard waited outside the bathroom, leaving Jake completely on his own for the first time since his capture.
There was no time limit on how long each man could stay in the bath, and Jake lost track of how long he stayed in the tub, floating, relaxing, and using up a whole bar of soap scrubbing his body. Another luxury awaited Jake after he climbed out of the bathtub and dried himself off. His stringy beard was trimmed and his head was shaved, sending his matted hair falling to the floor. Then he was given a new set of clothes to put on, and his old uniform was taken away. As he walked downstairs to join the other men, Jake felt like a new man.
As if bathing weren’t enough, that night the prisoners were served a hearty meal of steak and fresh vegetables, with strawberry jam and French bread. Jake gobbled the food down, marveling at just how good strawberry jam tasted smeared on bread.
Yet as he settled down for the night, a question ran through Jake’s mind: Why? After four months, why had they suddenly been allowed to bathe and put on new clothes? And why had they been fed such a good meal? Why? Why? Why? Jake wished he knew the answer. Given the way their Japanese captors had treated them over the past four months, their captors surely hadn’t had a change of heart about the Americans’ treatment. There had to be a reason why the men had been given baths and a good meal.
Chapter 10
Guilty
On August 28, 1942, a week after the eight airmen had taken their first bath in four months, the lock clicked, their cell door swung open, and the men were ordered outside. A stretcher was brought in for Dean, and Will and Bob Hite each took an end of it. Outside the cell, guards handcuffed and shackled each man and then marched them all outside into the daylight. Jake shielded his eyes against the bright glare.
It had been seventy days since Jake and the other airmen had entered the Bridge House Jail, and each man had lost about fifty pounds during his time there. The men’s hair was thin, their balance wobbly, and their spirits low. Jake knew that the others were all thinking the same thing he was thinking: where were they being taken?
The men were hauled up onto the back of a truck and driven off through the streets of Shanghai. Jake wondered whether they were headed for the countryside to be executed. As it turned out, they were taken to the Kiangwan Military Prison, several miles away on the outskirts of Shanghai. At Kiangwan the prisoners were unloaded from the truck and escorted into a cell block, where each man was assigned to his own nine-feet-long by five-feet-wide, concrete-walled cell.
The following morning the prisoners were taken from their cells and marched into a large room with a single long table set in the middle. After they entered the room, a guard yelled at the airmen to stand at attention. The airmen did not, however, attempt to lift Dean from his stretcher.
Jake tried to steady himself as three Japanese men, wearing the traditional garb of English barristers, solemnly walked into the room. In another time and place, Jake would have been amused by these short, brown-skinned men wearing long, curly black wigs and long black gowns, but the atmosphere in the room—which Jake now realized had turned into a courtroom—was deadly serious.
To one side of the table stood a translator, who introduced himself as Caesar Luis de Remedios. The half Portuguese, half Japanese man had been convicted of spying for the Allies and was serving a seven-year prison sentence. Because he spoke four languages (among them English) fluently, he had been put to work as an interpreter.
Each Doolittle Raider was asked to step forward and answer a few basic questions about himself: What was his name? What was his rank? Where was he from? Why had he joined the American military?
Jake and the others answered briefly, and de Remedios relayed their answers to the three Japanese judges. The proceedings then continued in Japanese, with no more translation into English. Neither Jake nor any of the others could understand what was being said. By watching carefully, however, Jake concluded that the judges were reading and reviewing a series of documents. At one stage the judges asked each man to verify that it was his signature on the paperwork being reviewed.
Jake’s heart sank when he was asked to verify his signature. He knew that the only time he had signed anything since being taken prisoner had been in the jail in Tokyo when he had been tortured and forced to sign something in Japanese. He had been told at the time that all he was signing was a document containing personal information that his captors needed for their files. Now he began to wonder whether he had unwittingly signed a “confession.”
The trial lasted for several hours. It was painful for Jake to be standing for that long and even more painful to be watching Dean in his delirious state slip in and out of consciousness. George wasn’t faring too well either. He fainted early in the proceedings, and the judges allowed him to sit on a chair.
Eventually the three judges gathered up all of the papers, bowed to each other, and left the room. Caesar Luis de Remedios turned to the airmen. “They asked me not to tell you what they have decided,” he said, as he, too, made a hasty exit.
The words were difficult to hear. Jake felt completely in limbo. Was he about to be executed? Returned to the solitary confinement of his cell? Tortured some more? He had no idea, and at this dark moment, no one option sounded better or worse than the other.
Jake and six of the other Doolittle Raiders were taken back to their cells, while two guards carried Dean on his stretcher down the corridor. As Jake watched Dean disappear, he wondered whether he would ever see the pilot of the Green Hornet again.
Life at Kiangwan Military Prison soon fell into its own monotonous routine. The meals were the same horrible rice soup they had been served at the Bridge House Jail, supplemented with sawdust-laden bread. The men were taken out of their cells each morning and allowed to wash their hands, clean their teeth, and exercise for ten minutes. Then it was back into their cell for the remainder of the day. The prisoners were not permitted to communicate with each other, and this worried Jake the most. Jake’s thoughts often turned to Dean. Was he getting any kind of medical attention or better food rations?
With the passing of each dreary day Jake became more incensed with the way the Japanese were treating him and his fellow airmen. Every soldier knew about the Geneva Convention, which stipulated how prisoners were to be treated. A prisoner of war was entitled to visits from the Red Cross, mail from home, and communication with the American consulate. But Jake had received none of these.
Twenty days later, on October 15, 1942, Jake was taken from his cell at 9:00 AM and told to wash himself in a basin of water. The weather was foggy and cool. It was not the weather, however, that sent chills down Jake’s back. It was the sight of several Chinese prisoners walking past, carrying shovels. His interest piqued, Jake looked around more closely and noticed that several of the guards were wearing their dress uniforms, the kind of uniform that signified some special event was about to take place.
Jake’s hands shook as he buttoned up his shirt. Was the “special” occasion their execution? Were the Chinese prisoners going to dig the airmen’s graves?
Despite Jake’s foreboding, nothing happened to him that day, and the next day he was taken back to the room where the “trial” had taken place. Jake’s spirit sagged as he found himself back in the courtroom standing at attention with Bob Hite, George Barr, Bob Meder, and Chase Nielsen. But Jake’s spirit sagged even further when he realized that Will, Harry, and Dean were missing. Jake had caught a glimpse of both Will and Harry two days before, but he had not seen Dean in the nearly two months since their trial.
About fifteen Japanese officers were crowded into the makeshift courtroom, and the same judges, wearing their ridiculous wigs, sat behind the long table. Jake wondered whether he and the others were going to be tried all over again.
When everyone was in place, the chief judge nodded to de Remedios, who began reading from a sheath of papers. “It has been proven beyond all doubt that the defendants, motivated by a false sense of glory, carried on indiscriminate bombing of schools and hospitals and machine-gunned innocent civilians with complete disregard for the rules of war…”
Jake took a deep breath as his befuddled brain tried to get a handle on what was being said. They had never fired on schools or hospitals, and the military targets they had bombed had been meticulously chosen so that innocent civilians would not be killed. He even remembered how some of the Raiders had wanted to bomb the emperor’s palace in Tokyo, but Jimmy Doolittle had strictly forbidden them to do so. Bitterly, Jake now wished they had bombed the place.
The interpreter continued in his strange accented English. “The tribunal finds the defendants guilty of Sections 1 and 2 of Article 2 of the Military Law concerning the Punishment of Enemy Airmen. Therefore, the military tribunal has passed judgment and imposes sentences under the provisions of Article 3 of that law. The tribunal, acting under the law…sentences the defendants to death!”
Caesar Luis de Remedios paused. Not a sound was heard in the courtroom. Jake saw Chase strain forward. As Chase did so, a guard raised his rifle and aimed it at Chase’s stomach.
With a cough, de Remedios shuffled his pages and read on. “Through the graciousness of His Majesty, the Emperor, your sentences are hereby commuted to life imprisonment with special treatment.” The interpreter wiped his brow with a handkerchief. His job done, he stepped behind the protection of the guards. In unison the guards formed a ring around the five airmen.
Jake tried to think what the words he’d just heard meant, but his brain was fuzzy from lack of food. Would the “special treatment” be good treatment or ongoing torture? And where were Dean, Will, and Harry? The men had no opportunity to ask questions, and they were marched back to their cells to continue with solitary confinement.
Over the next two days, as he sat alone in his cell, Jake came to believe that the other three airmen had been executed. It made some sense, as Will and Dean had piloted two of the planes that took part in the raid on Japan, and they were the two senior ranking officers among them. But what about Harry? Jake could not understand why he would have been executed. After all, like Jake, Harold was an enlisted man, the lowest in rank among the captured airmen.
The following day Jake and the other four airmen were told that their “special treatment” included one bath a week, a shave and haircut, and the opportunity to wash out their underwear and shirts. It was more than Jake had hoped for.
Days dragged into weeks as Jake sat alone in his tiny cell. He spent most of his time staring at the wall, though he did begin to compose poetry in his head to help pass some of the time. The only bright spot in this ordeal was de Remedios. Not only was he used as an interpreter in the prison, but also he was a trusty who was allowed out of his cell to assist the guards. One of his jobs was delivering the meager meals to the prisoners. As he slid the bowls of food through the slot in the cell door, he would often slip a balled-up piece of paper into the prisoner’s hand. Jake loved to receive these notes from him, and he knew the trusty was taking a risk by secretly passing them along. Sometimes the notes told how the other prisoners were doing in solitary confinement, and sometimes they brought news of what was happening beyond the prison doors. One day he slipped a note into Jake’s hand that read, “Japanese newspaper says big naval battle fought off Midway Island. I think they lost. War will soon be over. You will go home soon.”
