Jake appreciated the news and the encouragement, but as much as he wished he could go home, he doubted that he would ever see the United States again. He was certain, given what he had learned about the Japanese mindset during his imprisonment, that his captors would never release him alive, that he would most likely be executed before American soldiers arrived to liberate him and the other airmen.
As winter descended over Shanghai, the weather became bitter cold. With no heating in the cell block, conditions inside the cells became almost unbearable for Jake and the others. Jake now spent most of his days shivering, wrapping his arms around himself in a vain attempt to keep warm. One day de Remedios had passed a note to Jake saying that he was aware of their plight and was trying to get them warmer clothes and blankets. In this regard, December 5, 1942, was a red-letter day for Jake. That day the door to his cell swung open. Jake was taken from his cell, marched down the corridor and around the corner, and deposited into a large cell. Inside were Bob Hite, George Barr, Bob Meder, and Chase Nielsen. Before he locked the cell door, the guard threw fifteen blankets into the cell. Jake laughed out loud. Three blankets apiece! One to lay on the cold floor beneath him and two to pull over him for warmth. It was almost too good to be true.
For Jake, what was even better than getting three blankets was to again be with the other men. A babble of noise quickly filled the cell as the airmen rushed to say all they wanted to say to the others before they were once again parted and led back to their cells for more solitary confinement. To Jake’s surprise, however, no guard came to escort him or any of the other men away. The new cell arrangement appeared to be long-term, and Jake settled into the comfort of the company of his comrades.
Jake had not looked in a mirror since they had taken off from the USS Hornet on the morning of the raid, almost eight months before. But now looking at the sight of the other men, he could only imagine how bad he looked. They had all lost weight since being brought to Kiangwan Military Prison. Their belts were cinched up, their skinny bodies were emaciated, and their faces were gaunt and their cheeks sunken. Like the others, Jake could press his thumb into his leg bones and leave a permanent dent. He knew from Doc White’s first-aid lectures back on the Hornet that this was a sure sign of beriberi, a nerve disease brought on by a lack of vitamin B1 and prevalent among people whose sole sustenance consisted of white polished rice, even if the portions they ate were small. Jake knew that other symptoms of the disease included lack of concentration and muscle pain.
After several days, once the men ran out of things to talk about, Bob Meder took over the “social activities,” as he called them. Bob spent hours devising various games that the men could play to keep their minds active. He held a spelling bee, and there were quizzes to name state capitals, presidents, and the dates of various historical events. Bob also ran a lottery, and the man whose number was drawn would receive an extra half bowl of rice soup from the others. They also would draw lots on the order the bowls were passed through the slot in the cell door at mealtimes. Again the winner would receive an extra half bowl of soup from the others.
One of the favorite games that Bob introduced was the “flea-lice catch game,” which the men played every Sunday morning. The men’s fifteen blankets were piled up, and one blanket was laid out on the cell floor. The men then sat around the blanket, and when a signal was given, they proceeded to catch as many lice and fleas on the blanket as possible. The game continued until all fifteen blankets had been laid out and gone over.
The lice were white, fairly slow moving, and relatively easy to see and catch on the blanket, and each man received a point for every louse he caught. However, the fleas were dark, fast moving, and much harder to catch, and each man received five points for each flea he caught. The winner was the man with the most points. Jake enjoyed the game. Not only did it get the men laughing and passing the time, but also it fulfilled a practical function—delousing and defleaing their blankets once a week.
Once a week the men rotated where they sat. They took turns receiving the bowls of food as they were slid through the cell door and gathering the enamel bowls and cups and the chopsticks after they had eaten.
Since the men were now all together in one cell, it was easier for them to get information from Caesar Luis de Remedios. They no longer had to worry about finding out how the others were holding up in their cells and were now able to concentrate on gaining information about the world beyond their cell block. De Remedios was a lifeline. He fed the men any scrap of information about the war that he found in the local newspaper. For hours on end, the men would then discuss and dissect the information in every possible way.
One piece of information that kept Jake and the others occupied for hours was the fact that de Remedios had discovered other Americans in the prison. Over a series of days, the trusty managed to convey to the men that the names of the two prisoners were Commander Cunningham and Corporal Battles, both of whom had been captured when the Japanese overran Wake Island.
Jake also was heartened to learn that de Remedios had alerted the two other Americans to the presence of five of the Doolittle Raiders in the same prison with them. Now two more men knew of their survival after the raid and might be able to get word home to their families in the United States.
One day, eight months after arriving at Kiangwan Military Prison, Jake and the other four airmen were handcuffed, blindfolded, roped together, and led out to a waiting truck. Tomorrow, April 18, 1943, marked the anniversary of their bombing raid over Japan. Jake’s stomach lurched as he contemplated the next few hours. Was more retaliation coming his way as the Japanese commemorated the attack?
Chapter 11
Everything Was New and Alive
Jake and the other four Doolittle Raiders sat silently as the truck rumbled along. Little was said throughout the journey as they all contemplated what might be about to happen to them. Jake had held out the vague hope that they would be reunited with Dean, Will, and Harry, but these men were nowhere to be seen. Despite his best efforts, Jake found himself thinking about the three men’s probable deaths and hoping that their executions had been swift.
When the truck came to a halt, the men were transferred to an airplane, and a short while later they were airborne. The flight lasted about an hour. When they landed, George and Chase, both trained navigators, whispered that from the landmarks they had been able to spot as they peeked out of the corner of their blindfolds during the flight, they were in Nanking, northwest of Shanghai.
In Nanking they were taken from the airplane to another prison. This prison, with its shiny metal doors and fresh paint, appeared to be new. But Jake’s heart dropped when he realized that he and his friends were once again being put into solitary confinement. Jake braced himself for the endless hours he would have to spend alone again. He pondered a comment that Chase had made one day back at Kiangwan Military Prison. Chase had observed that the hardest thing to do was nothing at all. He said that the human mind and body were made to do things and noted how torturous it became when that was taken away and a man was left with nothing to do.
The only consolation for Jake was that he was put in the smallest cell, he presumed because he was the shortest of the Doolittle Raiders. That the cell measured only five feet by five feet wasn’t the good news. The good news, as Jake discovered, was that since the walls were only five feet apart, he was able to climb up them by placing his feet and hands on opposite walls. In this manner he could inch his way up to the tiny vent window about ten feet up the wall. There he was rewarded with a view of the countryside. How wonderful it was to catch a glimpse of people going about their business. Of course, he could climb the walls only when no one was watching. He had no idea what the punishment for such an activity would be, and he did not want to find out.
Jake enjoyed another pleasant surprise at the Nanking prison. Since the place was so new, it was not yet infested with lice, fleas, or rats.
Yet another surprise was in store for Jake at the prison. A short while after his arrival there, a desk and chair were brought into the cell and nailed down to the floor. In Jake’s case the desk and chair created a challenge to sleep around, but it was a challenge Jake was willing to endure to have a chair to sit on and a desk to lean against during the day. Jake fantasized about having a book to read or some paper to write on. During the past few months, he’d composed a lot of poetry in his head, but it was difficult to keep all the poems straight in his mind without writing them down.
In other ways, though, the new prison was a disaster. The men’s food rations were cut to one small bowl of rice and one bowl of watery soup served twice a day. Also, the men were allowed to exercise together for only fifteen minutes each day.
The five airmen found a way to communicate with each other despite the fact that they were in their own cells in solitary confinement. As part of their Army Air Corps training, each man had learned Morse code. The men worked out a system whereby a tap on the cell wall was a dot, and a scratch was a dash. In this way Jake and the others were able to send and receive messages from the man in the next cell.
As the weeks in the prison slowly dragged on, Jake realized that the prison guards were almost as bored as their prisoners, and some interactions between the two groups started to take place. The guards would brag about how the Japanese were winning every battle they fought, yet from the names of the battles Jake could tell that the Allies were getting closer to the islands of Japan. Of course, this realization didn’t make sense. If the Japanese were really winning the war, they surely should be storming the U.S. mainland by now. The fact that they weren’t gave Jake hope that someday the Allies would win. When he mentioned this to the guards, they laughed and declared that it did not really matter to the prisoners who won the war. One way or another they would never see their homeland again. If by some great misfortune the Japanese did lose, the guards had orders to behead all “war criminals” before the Allies had a chance to find and liberate the prisoners.
The long, hot summer gave way to fall, and then winter—the coldest winter on record—descended over Nanking. The men were given warmer clothes, which they wore over their existing clothes, but with no body fat, Jake found it impossible to keep warm. He also was concerned about Bob Meder, who showed up for exercise every morning but was unable to do much more than lift his arms into the air.
Over the past several months, all of the men had noticed the deterioration in Bob’s condition. Bob was severely ill and looked gaunt and weak. His hip bones stuck out through his pants, and his eyes were sunken and black. Jake guessed that Bob now weighed no more than eighty pounds. Bob looked more and more like a walking skeleton than a human being. By mid-November Bob’s condition had deteriorated further, and his legs were swollen from beriberi. Bob was able to make it out to the exercise yard each day, but once there, he was so weak that all he could do was sit and stare. Despite his condition, Bob never complained to the other men. He simply accepted his condition. It was obvious to Jake and the others that he was near death.
On December 1, 1943, Jake heard several men hammering and sawing in the courtyard. He clambered up the wall and looked through the small window. What he saw chilled his heart. The men were building a coffin. Jake shut his eyes, hoping that his runaway thoughts were wrong. But they were not.
