Worst of all was the airmen’s combined smell. Jake had not had access to water to wash or clean his teeth since being captured by the Japanese, and from the smell of the others, he concluded that they had received the same treatment. The men’s clothes were stained and filthy.
The men looked at each other in silence. Jake was sure they were thinking the same thing he was. In the course of their interrogations, had they just unwittingly signed their death warrants and were they about to be executed? Jake didn’t know, and a part of him was too tired to even care.
Execution was not in the plans, however. Instead, the men were herded away from their prison block toward the southeast end of the prison. They soon found themselves in an empty block, or at least Jake thought it was empty until one of the guards opened a cell door. Sitting dejectedly inside the cell was a man in a filthy Army Air Corps uniform. Jake peered more closely. It was Lieutenant Chase Nielson, the navigator from plane #6, the Green Hornet. The man was emaciated like the rest of them, and from the bruises, blood, and filthy uniform, Jake knew that he had also been tortured by their captors.
While Jake was surprised to see another member of Doolittle’s Raiders, he was too tired and sore to care much. Will was pushed into the cell with Lieutenant Nielson, and Jake and Harold were herded into the next cell. Once the lock of the cell door clicked shut, Jake sank to the floor, exhausted from the walk.
Before being captured by the Japanese, Jake imagined that he would have been glad to be reunited with other Doolittle Raiders. But after three weeks of captivity, his mind was foggy, and he wondered whether Harold might have sold out as a Japanese spy. Jake and Harold barely spoke, and from what Jake could hear from the other cells, none of the others were baring their souls to each other either. Besides, the guards beat anyone who did dare to speak. But through a chain of whispers in the night, Jake did learn that Dean Hallmark and Bob Meder, two other members from the Green Hornet crew, were also in the cell block, and that the other two crew members, Bill Dieter and Don Fitzmaurice, were dead.
Days passed in the cell block, and the only relief from the boredom was their three “meals” a day. Each meal consisted of a cup of weak tea and two slices of bread, nowhere near enough food to stave off Jake’s gnawing hunger. If they don’t execute us soon, we’ll starve to death, Jake thought as he fought back the nauseating weakness from lack of food.
On June 15, 1942, fifty days after the prisoners had been brought to Tokyo from China, there was a change in routine. Jake was once again taken into the interrogation room. This time a guard motioned for him to sit down on a chair by the desk. A piece of paper lay on the desk.
“Well, well. We are asking you to sign this paper now,” Jake’s interrogator began. “It contains only personal information which we need for our files. If you do not sign it, you will be executed immediately.”
The interrogator thrust a pen into his hand, and Jake sighed deeply. What could he do? He looked at the Japanese characters in rows on the paper. They meant nothing to him. For all he knew, he was about to sign a paper begging the emperor of Japan to execute him since he now realized his folly in bombing the land of the rising sun. But what choice did he have? If he did not sign the paper, he was a dead man anyway.
Jake wrote his full name, Jacob Daniel DeShazer. It was the first time he’d held a pen and written his name since signing the crew manifest on the USS Hornet over seven weeks ago.
After signing his name, Jake was taken back to his cell, and the next Doolittle Raider was taken away to the interrogation room. Before lunch all eight men had signed papers that they could not read.
Once the papers were signed, events moved swiftly. All eight American airmen were led into the central courtyard. Jake scanned the other seven men, who were all as dirty and unkempt as he was. None of them had bathed or shaved since leaving the Hornet. Their hair was matted, and their khaki uniforms were now a dull gray. Dean Hallmark, the Green Hornet’s pilot, was limping badly.
As the eight American airmen stood together, lights flashed and they were all photographed, after which they were hurried two at a time into cars and driven away. Soon they pulled up at a train station and were loaded into a waiting train carriage. Because of their combined smell, other passengers in the carriage moved as far away from the men as they could get.
The temperature inside the carriage soon began to rise as more people crowded onto the train. To make matters worse, the train’s coal-fired engines billowed an extraordinary amount of soot, which drifted in through the open windows of the carriage, coating everyone with a layer of black grime, though it was hard to notice it on the captured airmen.
The only positive thing about the train trip was that Jake and his fellow captives were fed the same food as the rest of the passengers aboard. For the first time since eating the cake that tasted like apple butter after his capture back in China, Jake was eating something tasty. He wasn’t exactly sure what it was that was served with the rice, but the food had flavor, and it wasn’t bread. Jake hungrily gulped down everything that he was served. Unfortunately, the rich and tasty food upset his stomach.
As the late afternoon sun, which was beginning to set in the west, filtered in through the carriage windows, Jake was able to work out from the angle of the train to the sun that they were headed in a southwesterly direction. Forty-eight hours later the train pulled into the Nagasaki station, where a military escort was waiting for them. As jarring as the trip had been, Jake was grateful for the six good meals he had been served onboard. He felt stronger already. That night the eight airmen found themselves together in a large, steel cell. No one seemed to care whether they talked together, and no one appeared to be listening.
With food in their stomachs and a change of environment, the men began to talk about their capture. Before long the stories of the crewmen in the Green Hornet tumbled out. Unlike the Bat, the Green Hornet had not quite made it to the Chinese coast. It had run out of fuel four minutes from making landfall in China and only one hundred feet above the sea. The men had had no way to bail out of the B-25, and Dean had tried to belly-land the plane into the ocean. However, the sea was so rough that the waves had thrown the Green Hornet back into the air, where it flipped over and landed nose first in the sea. In the process, one of the wings ripped off, and the cabin split open and began to fill with water.
Miraculously, all five crew members had survived the impact and had managed to drag themselves onto the wing of the plane. Several of them, however, had sustained serious injuries. Dean had large gashes in both his legs; gunner/engineer Don Fitzmaurice had a deep hole bashed into his forehead; and bombardier Bill Dieter, in the nose of the plane, had banged his head sharply on impact. Navigator Chase Nielsen had suffered only a broken nose, and copilot Bob Meder had escaped pretty much unscathed.
As Bob tried to inflate the rubber life raft, the cord that operated the CO2 canister broke. The life raft was useless. Before they could come up with an alternative plan to get to shore, a wave washed the men off the wing into the icy sea. Bob could see that Don was not going to make it to shore on his own, so he grabbed his life jacket and began towing the gunner ashore.
It had taken Bob four hours to make it to shore, and when he did, he found Don unconscious. Bob had tried to revive Don with the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation techniques they had been taught on the Hornet, but it was to no avail. Don had died. A short distance away, Bob had found the body of bombardier Bill Dieter. Dean and Chase had been washed ashore farther along the beach and managed to crawl to safety.
At dawn each of the three surviving airmen had been captured by a group of Chinese guerillas, and the three of them were reunited in a local village. The following day the three airmen watched as their two crewmates were buried by the guerillas. They said a prayer for Bill and Don. They told the crew of the Bat that they thought about what Jimmy Doolittle had said before they all left on the mission: “Some will come home as heroes. Others as angels.”
The next morning Captain Ling, leader of the Chinese guerillas, had arranged for the three survivors to be taken downriver in a sampan to the city of Wenchow. The men were taken to a safe house, but unfortunately Ling had betrayed them. Before long, Captain Ling had led Japanese soldiers to the house, where they had arrested Don, Chase, and Bob.
From there the three survivors’ story was a lot like that of the crew of the Bat. The men had been interrogated in China by the Japanese and brought to Tokyo for further interrogation and torture.
The five members of the Bat crew then told their stories of bailing out over Nanchang, China, and how each of them had eventually been arrested.
By the time night fell, Jake and the others were all exhausted. The two crews now knew each other’s story, but what about the crews of the other fourteen bombers? Were they scattered around Japan and China, being interrogated and beaten as well? This was a depressing thought.
The following morning all eight men were led in handcuffs and shackles down to the waterfront and marched onto a ship. As far as Jake could figure out, their only possible destination was China—again.
Chapter 9
Bridge House
For whatever reason, the Japanese sent the Doolittle Raiders they had captured from Japan back to China. When the ship that carried the American airmen from Nagasaki docked in Shanghai on June 19, 1942, Jake felt deflated. He was sure the others also felt the same way. Throughout the voyage he had been hoping that an American submarine would torpedo the ship, giving them some chance of escape, or at least a quick death. But it had not happened.
As Jake shuffled his shackled feet down the gangplank and off the ship, he looked around. Ships and small Chinese junks were everywhere, including the wrecks of several British freighters that had obviously been sunk during the Japanese assault on, and capture of, Shanghai. Dean Hallmark, pilot of the Green Hornet, was too weak from his leg wounds to walk, and was carried from the ship on a stretcher.
On the dock the men were shoved into the back of a truck and driven a short distance to a modern-looking building. “Welcome to Bridge House,” one of the guards sneered as the prisoners were led inside.
Jake’s pulse raced. He had heard the name “Bridge House” somewhere before, perhaps on the USS Hornet. He wasn’t exactly sure where he had heard of it, but he knew that before the war the Bridge House in Shanghai had been an English hotel, which the Japanese had converted into a prison for the political prisoners they held in China. It was supposedly one of the most notorious and horrific prisons in Asia.
It did not take Jake and the others long to find out exactly how bad the prison was. The men were thrown into a holding cell on the bottom floor. The cell was more like a bamboo cage, set twenty-four inches off the ground. Jake estimated it to be about twenty feet long by six feet wide, about the size of a boxcar. Inside were thirty of the most wretched people Jake had ever seen. Even his nightmares could not conjure up a more hopeless vision of desperation.
Most people barely looked up as the eight airmen were pushed into the cell and the door locked behind them. Everyone was seated cross-legged, staring at the cell door, and some of the men had to move to make way for Dean and his stretcher. The rest of the airmen, including Jake, followed the lead of the other prisoners and sat down, though they had barely enough room to do so. As Jake sat down, a man nearby groaned and rolled over. A guard rushed up to the side of the bamboo cell and poked him with a stick. The man righted himself and continued his pointless vigil of staring at the door.
