Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (61 page)

CHAPTER 22

One cannot imagine the barbarism of the Japs till one witnesses it with his own eyes.

—FATHER LOUIS BERESWILL, JANUARY 29, 1943, LETTER

JAPANESE
LEADERS
FUMED
OVER
the Tokyo raid, which had revealed China’s coastal provinces as a dangerous blind spot in the defense of the homeland. American aircraft carriers not only could launch surprise attacks at sea and land in China but could possibly even fly bombers directly from Chinese airfields to attack Japan. Military leaders needed to eliminate that threat by wiping out the airfields in the provinces of Chekiang and Kiangsi. The Imperial General Headquarters ordered an immediate campaign against those bases, issuing an operational plan in late April: “The primary mission will be to defeat the enemy in the Chekiang area and to destroy the air bases from which the enemy might conduct aerial raids on the Japanese Homeland.”

Japanese forces occupied the area along the lower reaches of the Yangtse River. The Imperial General Headquarters ordered the main force of the Thirteenth Army, along with elements of the Eleventh Army and the North China Area Army, to execute the operation. That force ultimately swelled to fifty-three infantry battalions, along with as many as sixteen artillery battalions. The plan called for the capture of the larger airfields at Chuchow
, Lishui, and Yushan—all fields Doolittle had hoped to use—as well as the destruction of many other, smaller bases in the region. Orders left little doubt about the horror to come. “The captured areas will be occupied for a period estimated at approximately one month,” they demanded. “Airfields, military installations and important lines of communication will be totally destroyed.”

The United States had neither boots on the ground nor faith that the Chinese military could repel a Japanese invasion. Details of the destruction that would soon follow—just as officials in Washington and Chungking, and even Doolittle, had long predicted—would come from the records of American missionaries, some of whom had helped the raiders. The missionaries knew of the potential wrath of the Japanese, having lived under a tenuous peace in this border region just south of occupied China. Stories of the atrocities at Nanking, where the river had turned red from blood, had circulated widely. “When the Japs come into a town the first thing that you see is a group of cavalrymen,” Herbert Vandenberg, an American priest, would recall. “The horses have on shiny black boots. The men wear boots and a helmet. They are carrying sub-machine guns.”

Vandenberg had heard the news broadcasts of the Tokyo raid in the mission compound in the town of Linchwan, home to about fifty thousand people, as well as to the largest Catholic church in southern China, with a capacity to serve as many as a thousand. Days after the raid letters reached Vandenberg from nearby missions in Poyang and Ihwang, informing him that local priests cared for some of the fliers—Watson’s and Knobloch’s crews. “They came to us on foot,” Vandenberg said. “They were tired and hungry. Their clothing was tattered and torn from climbing down the mountains after bailing out. We gave them fried chicken. We dressed their wounds and washed their clothes. The nuns baked cakes for the fliers. We gave them our beds.”

The arrival of the raiders worried Vandenberg and the other priests; Japanese forces were entrenched just fifty miles north in Nanchang. By late May reports circulated that those forces were on the move. Father Steve Dunker suggested Vandenberg set off June 1 for Hangpu—about twenty miles away—and take forty-five of the Chinese orphans over the age of ten. Fathers Dunker and Clarence Murphy would remain behind with about fifty Chinese girls who were too small to make the difficult journey. Each day the news worsened
as Japanese forces closed in on Linchwan. On June 4 Dunker and Murphy decided it was time to get out. The priests packed a wheelbarrow of supplies and planned to set off to follow Vandenberg the next morning.

But at 1:30 a.m. on June 5, Japanese soldiers arrived armed with machine guns. A heavy rain fell as troops pounded on the gate of the mission residence. The gatekeeper peered out the window and stalled, claiming he could not find the key, as he alerted the Americans inside. Dunker and Murphy darted from bed, slipped outside, and hid in the mission’s air-raid trenches in the garden. The soldiers forced the local priest Father Joseph Kwei to escort them through the entire compound, demanding that he open all the doors to facilitate the search. The soldiers looted the valuables and then trashed the church.

“Where are the Americans?” the Japanese demanded.

Dunker and Murphy stayed in the air-raid trench until about 4 a.m. and then shortly before sunrise grabbed a ladder, leaned it against the fourteen-foot wall, and started up. A sentry spotted them and opened fire just as the clergy hopped over the wall. The two priests escaped and trudged through the flooded rice paddies to join Vandenberg at Hangpu, arriving later that night exhausted and with blistered feet. On Sunday, June 7, while the three priests gathered with the orphans for services in the mission, machine guns rattled on the outskirts of Hangpu. The Japanese had caught up to them.

“Come on!” Vandenberg shouted. “Run for your lives.”

The orphans and priests fled again. “It was a mad screaming flight across swollen creeks up into the hills,” Vandenberg recalled. “At night we slept in the straw in a Chinese temple. We had no food.” The priests headed for the village of Ihwang, figuring that the Japanese would never go that far. “Ihwang was in the mountains; on the road to nowhere; unimportant militarily; hard to get to, etc.,” recalled Father Wendelin Dunker—Steve’s cousin—who had helped care for Harold Watson’s crew. “I just could not seem to believe that they would come there in any manner, shape or form.”

News reached Dunker that the priests and orphans were en route, so he saddled his horse and rode out to meet them on the afternoon of June 8. Days on the run had left them exhausted. Though Dunker believed the Japanese would never come, he began to pack supplies and sent a man to hire a boat. If necessary, the priests could
go to Ou-tu, about seventeen miles away, where the mission had a small church and school. The exhausted priests stretched out at 1 p.m. An hour later machine-gun fire rattled outside the north gate, followed soon by bullets zipping over the residence. Steve Dunker darted downstairs. “The Japs are here,” he shouted. “The Japs are here.”

The priests and orphans charged out of the mission. Wendelin Dunker waited only long enough to grab a briefcase of cash before he followed the others. “Was out the back gate in about two minutes but at that I was the last one,” he later wrote in a letter to his parents. “Boy, oh boy, was this place emptied in a hurry!”

The priests and orphans joined the local masses, who fled across the bridge out of town. “We thought we were fast but we were slow compared to a lot of the people in the town,” Dunker wrote. “There were hundreds and hundreds ahead of us and thousands behind.” He described the scene again in a letter to Bishop John O’Shea. “Believe me,” he wrote, “a record was made in getting out of town and across the river.”

The Japanese pursued the escapees, opening fire on them. “Bullets whistled over our heads,” Vandenberg recalled. “As we ran we looked up on the mountainside where lay the gleaming wreckage of one of the Doolittle bombers. It was a fearful sight for we knew that we were paying a price for the work of that plane.”

The priests hiked throughout the afternoon, resting that evening in the home of a local Catholic. “When we stopped to make an inventory,” Dunker wrote, “we were six priests with the clothes on our backs, some money, but not a thing else.” The priests not only had no supplies, but Dunker realized that in his escape he had failed to consume the Blessed Sacrament. “The more I thought of it,” he wrote, “the more convinced I became that it would be a relatively simple matter, and probably not too dangerous either, to return to Ihwang and get some things out of the residence, consume the Blessed Sacrament in the church, and do so without being caught by the Japs.”

Dunker recruited three of the mission’s workmen and set out that night for the five-mile hike back to town. “The Lord was with us,” he wrote in a letter, “for we found one bridge unguarded.” The men slipped across and headed for the mission. “When I entered the back gate of the residence I could see no light of any kind in any of the buildings, nor could I hear any sound
,” he later wrote. “I felt sure if the Japs were sleeping in any of the buildings there, they would have had guards, and likewise some sort of light somewhere. Nevertheless I approached the priest’s house very cautiously, and listened for any sort of sound. But not a sound was to be heard.”

Dunker slipped inside the church, where he opened the tabernacle and consumed the Blessed Sacrament. He next went to the stable, stunned to find that the Japanese had left the mission’s two horses, though one soon ran off. Dunker and the workmen rounded up baskets of clothes, flour, and Mass wines that would be needed to survive in the hills, each tasked to carry as much as eighty pounds. Rather than use a saddle, Dunker draped five blankets over the horse, making his return comfortable “in body if not in mind.” “I had to ride pretty carefully tho,” he wrote, “for with all those things wrapped around the horse it was like riding an elephant in width if not in height.”

Dunker and the workmen made it back to the others at daybreak. After breakfast the group set out again, reaching Ou-tu that night. Dunker’s money allowed the priests to buy rice and vegetables. Reports of the Japanese advance continued, prompting the group to press on to Ken-kwo-gee, a village of less than a dozen families where the missionaries owned a building that doubled as a chapel and priest’s room. “It was half way up a mountain, in a small valley, and the only way of getting to it was by a small path that wound through the mountains,” Dunker wrote. “We used doors, boards and what not for beds, and for the first time in about a week felt relatively safe.”

Dunker’s group wasn’t alone. Throughout the region foreign priests and villagers alike sought refuge from the Japanese fury in the mountains, including the California native Bishop Charles Quinn, the vicar apostolic of Yukiang. Quinn had met Doolittle when he passed through en route to Chungking. “We found a package of American cigarettes and were able to give each boy one cigarette,” he recalled. “I believe they appreciated them more than they did the breakfast.” Accompanied by eight priests and five Sisters of Charity, Quinn led some two hundred orphans into the hills about fifty miles from Yukiang. An Italian priest, Father Humbert Verdini, had begged to remain behind along with thirty-eight orphans, many of them children or elderly. Quinn relented, assuming that, since Japan had allied with Italy, Verdini would be safe.

The journey proved difficult with
small children and elderly nuns. “With haste we moved children, food, clothes from our residence,” recalled Father Bill Stein, “first by boat then by short stage to fit the traveling of the young people, moving farther than farther, trying to distance ourselves from town, and bringing us to the mountain vastness where we would hide.” The group settled first in an abandoned temple, but the locals feared Japanese reprisals and encouraged them to move farther, telling them of an abandoned bandit hideout in the woods. Quinn went so far as to buy guns and to station guards at the foot of the mountains, a move Stein opposed.

“Bill, what are we to do?” the bishop replied. “We have these children and Sisters to protect should the Japs find us. We must give them a chance to escape. Our duty is to protect them.”

The group set out to make a camp, constructing huts and digging toilets, a job made all the more difficult by a lack of nails. “Under the tutorage of the local farmers,” Stein recalled, “using crude instruments, we felled the trees, dug holes in the granite soil, bound trees with vines, thatched our seven framed huts with straw, constructed beds of bamboo frames—all this done under the damp heat of summer.” Smith had bought a lot of salt before evacuation, which the missionaries used to trade with local farmers for vegetables and the occasional chicken or duck. “All of us lost much weight,” Stein recalled, “but God helping, we survived.”

WENDELIN DUNKER WAITED ABOUT
ten days before news reached him in the hills that the Japanese had moved through Ihwang. The anxious priest recruited Father Clarence Murphy to return with him to survey the damage and protect mission property from looters. “What a scene of destruction and smells met us as we entered the city!” he later wrote. “There were packs of dogs, whose masters either had fled or had been killed, and who had no one to feed them. Consequently even though many of the cadavers had been covered after a fashion by people who had returned to the town, the dogs usually dug them out to get something to eat. The big maggot-producing flies were almost as thick as snowflakes in a snow storm,” Dunker continued. “They swarmed about you, and you had to keep your mouth closed lest they fly into your mouth.”