The plane soon settled in to its gas-saving mode, skimming along less than a hundred feet above the ocean. For a moment Jake was back in the United States, hedgehopping over ranch land, scaring the cows below, and whisking the hats off people. That had been fun. This time it was a life-or-death situation.
The flight seemed to go on forever, partly because the extra drag on the plane from the hole in the nose slowed down the Bat—a fact that created its own set of worries—but also because the pilots had been instructed to fly slowly, between 150 and 166 miles per hour, to get the maximum gas mileage. If they went any slower they would fall out of the sky.
Not much conversation took place between the five crew members on the flight. The din of engines and the howl of the wind blowing into the plane made it almost impossible to talk without yelling, even over the intercom. Jake made sure that the .30-caliber machine gun in front of him was cocked and loaded and ready to fire and that it slid and turned freely on its mount. He checked and rechecked his bombsight to make sure it was working properly. And he crawled back to the bomb bay to make sure that the bombs were armed and that they would release properly when the time came to drop them over Japan. While doing this, Jake watched Harold in the rear pour gas from the five-gallon cans into the plane’s fuel tank. When Harold had done so, he punched holes in the empty cans and threw them out of the aircraft. The holes in the cans would ensure that the cans filled with water and sank, instead of leaving a floating trail on the surface of the water for the Japanese to follow. But mostly the hours passed tediously as the men waited for the coast of Japan to come into view.
Of course, there was plenty for the men to be concerned about. The bomber was bound for the city of Nagoya to drop its bombs. But because of the hole in the Plexiglas, the men wondered if they would arrive over Nagoya a lot later than the other planes, and if the Japanese would be waiting for them. The element of surprise would be taken away. They had no way of knowing how the other planes were faring, and any form of radio contact was out of the question since the signal could be intercepted by the Japanese. Instead, the crew listened in to a Tokyo radio station and watched for signs of life above and below them as the Bat wound its way toward Japan.
Chapter 6
Bailout
It was exactly one in the afternoon when the Bat reached the Japanese island of Honshu. Navigator George Barr ran his hands over a succession of maps trying to locate the exact spot of coastline they were about to fly over. When he had ascertained their position, he relayed instructions to Will, and the B-25 began banking to the south.
The city of Nagoya, their target, was located about three hundred miles southwest of Tokyo. To reach it, the bomber began to climb up to about seven thousand feet in altitude to cross a range of mountains. As the plane climbed through a bank of clouds, Jake was surprised to see people living high on the mountains. The plane was flying close enough to the mountains that from his perch in the nose of the bomber Jake could see people on the ground. When they saw the plane pass overhead, the people stopped and waved. Jake could clearly make out the faces of children. He chuckled when an old man with a gray beard threw his walking stick to one side and dived to the ground as the plane flew over him. Obviously the people below thought that the plane was one of their own Japanese bombers. Jake fervently hoped that they would drop their load of bombs in Nagoya and be out of harm’s way before anyone realized the truth—that they were Americans.
As they crossed the mountains, the weather on the other side was sunny, and the Bat basked in the bright Saturday afternoon as it began to descend and close in on Nagoya. As Jake looked down, he frowned. The terrain below did not look much like the maps they had spent so many hours poring over on the USS Hornet. Still, Jake trusted that George knew how to do his job and get them to their bombing targets.
Within minutes George’s voice came on the intercom. “Get ready to drop bombs at five hundred feet. I see the target,” George told Jake. Jake looked out the front of the nose, and there was their first target, a group of oil storage tanks.
The plane continued its steady pace as Jake lined up the target in his bombsight. As they passed over the storage tanks, he pulled the release and dropped two of the five-hundred-pound incendiary bombs from the plane’s bomb bay.
After the bombing run, Will banked the B-25 in a turn, and Jake craned his neck to look back and see the damage the bombs had done. The oil storage tanks were in flames, though they hadn’t yet exploded. Jake expected to see a massive fireball erupt at any moment. He could see smoke and flames rising from two other locations in the city, and he knew this could mean only one thing—planes #14 and #15 had also made it to Nagoya and dropped their bombs. As they climbed to line up on their next target, Jake could see plane #14 off to the right below them. The Bat had made better time than he’d thought on the flight from the Hornet. Antiaircraft fire filled the air near plane #14, which was headed south and flying away from Nagoya as fast as it could.
Antiaircraft fire was now also being fired at the Bat as it lined up on the next target. Jake soon realized that the smell of acrid smoke that had invaded the plane was not from the burning fuel tanks but from the shots being fired at them from the ground.
Will brought the B-25 around and flew the length of a long low industrial building below. The building was an aircraft factory, and as they flew over it, Jake released the last of the incendiary bombs, which crashed through the roof of the building and exploded in sheets of flame.
With their targets hit, it was time to leave. Will banked the plane sharply as they turned to the south and prepared to follow planes #14 and #15 away from Japan and out over the ocean.
Soon they were skimming low over water as they fled from Nagoya. Jake manned the .30-caliber machine gun in front of him. A small fishing boat loomed on the bay below, bobbing in the calm water. A fisherman, unaware of what had just happened on land, waved at the oncoming plane. Jake, trigger-happy to return fire at someone, fired off several rounds from the machine gun at the fishing boat. He wasn’t a good shot, and the bullets missed the boat as the man stopped waving and dived for cover.
Jake laughed as he fired, as much out of relief as anything else. The men had completed their mission. They had dropped their bombs on the right targets and evaded enemy antiaircraft fire. Yet Jake, like the other members of the crew, knew the worst was still ahead of them. No one could forget that they had been burning more fuel because of the hole in the Plexiglas nose, and the sun over Nagoya had been left behind and the weather was rapidly deteriorating.
Two Japanese zero fighter planes gave chase, pulling up behind the B-25, but Will climbed into a bank of gathering clouds and soon lost them. They soon resumed their low altitude, skimming along above the sea. But the glistening, calm water below them soon turned into a raging gray mass as they headed along the southeastern coast of Japan, before striking out over the East China Sea for China. Along the way, they lost sight of planes #14 and #15. They were now on their own.
It was foggy, and darkness was descending when they reached the Chinese coast. George worked feverishly to locate their position on the maps in front of him. North China and most of the Chinese coastal area were under Japanese control, and they wanted to be sure they landed their plane in friendly, free China.
An hour later George announced that they were over Choo Chow Lishui, one of the Doolittle Raiders’ rendezvous sites. Will circled the area, calling repeatedly on the radio for anyone below. But he got no answer. The fog cleared a little, and Jake could make out a small town below them, but he could see no airfield. They had no choice but to fly on, hoping for a break in the weather and a landing strip somewhere farther inland.
An hour later, the low-fuel light flashed on in the B-25. Jake busied himself staring below, hoping to see some sign of friendly territory. Will circled above a town at an altitude of three thousand feet looking for a runway, but there wasn’t one.
“It’s got to be Nanchang,” George told Jake over the intercom. “Will says get ready to jump.”
Jake remembered that in a briefing back on the USS Hornet they had been warned that the Japanese most likely controlled the area around Nanchang. But with no fuel left in the plane’s tanks, after thirteen hours aloft, they had no choice but to leave the B-25 bomber behind. They would know soon enough whether the Japanese or the friendly Chinese held the area below.
George was the first to bail out. Jake watched as he dropped out the forward hatch into the darkness. Then it was Jake’s turn to jump. He slid his pistol, knife, and ration packets into the pockets of his leather jacket. As he edged toward the open hatch, he tried to recall all he had been taught during Army Air Corps training about making a parachute jump. At that time the closest he had come to making a real parachute jump was lowering himself with his parachute through the hatch of a bomber parked on the ground and dropping to the tarmac. But this time he was three thousand feet above China, and his survival depended on his following the steps he had been taught in training. He checked the tension on the harness of his parachute, made sure the handle of the ripcord was free, and then slowly began lowering himself out the hatch. But no sooner had Jake dropped his legs through the hatch than the wind caught them and pressed them back against the fuselage of the plane. In fact, the wind pressed them against the plane so hard that Jake had to push with all his might on the door frame to get out of the hatch. Then suddenly he felt himself slip free. He began falling into the darkness.
Above him Jake could see the B-25, and when it had passed over him, he pulled on the ripcord of his parachute. Moments later he felt an upward jerk. He knew his parachute had properly opened. He could hear the drone of the bomber’s engines trail away above him. Jake was now totally on his own, falling through the darkness over a country in which he had never before set foot. He felt utterly alone.
Jake was enveloped not only in darkness as he descended toward the ground but also in dense fog and rain. He could see nothing and had no way of telling how close he was to he ground. Then suddenly his body crashed into the earth with a jolt, and Jake was aware that he was sprawled out and facedown.
After many hours in the air, Jake was back on land. But it wasn’t dry land. Rain was pouring down, and he could feel mud squelching through his fingers. Jake rolled over and got to his knees. It was pitch black as he fumbled around and unlatched his parachute. Then, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized he was kneeling on top of a mound, and there were other mounds of about the same size all around him. Then it dawned on him—he had landed on top of a grave. He chuckled to himself. Of all places to land, he had dropped down right on top of the final resting place of a Chinese man.
Farther out, beyond the mounds, he could see pools of blackness that rippled in the wind. Remembering back to their briefings on the Hornet, Jake concluded that these must be flooded rice paddies.
Aware that his four crewmates must have all jumped by now, Jake slid his pistol out of his pocket and shot it into the air. He listened for a response—either a shout or a gunshot—but he could hear only eerie silence.
Suddenly loneliness again overcame him. Had everyone else survived the jump? Would they strike out in the same direction and meet up? If the Japanese occupied the territory, how long would it be before Japanese soldiers found him? Or by some miracle had they bailed out over a Chinese stronghold?
