Unsettled History: America, China, and the Doolittle Tokyo Raid

- [Narrator] April 18, 1942, 80 young American airmen are about to embark on their first combat mission.

[soft music] It might also be their last.

The planes they are flying were never intended to launch from an aircraft carrier, but that's what they're about to do.

They have enough fuel to reach their targets, military and industrial sites in Tokyo and five other Japanese cities, but not much farther.

And even if they somehow make their way to China and relative safety, no one knows they're coming.

Decades later, the children of those aviators visited China to quite literally walk in their fathers' footsteps.

But is this mission remembered in China as heroic or misguided?

What kind of reception will they receive at a time when America/China relations are bad, very bad?

[soft music] One historical event, two different stories.

What really happened?

[upbeat music] The Pacific Ocean, vast and beautiful, seemingly endless.

In 1941, millions of Americans hoped this vastness would protect them from a war that had been raging in Asia for more than 10 years.

They were wrong.

A year earlier, David Thatcher, a farm boy from Montana, decided his future was in the US Army Air Corps.

- When he was a young child, he saw an airplane flying overhead on that dry land farm, and from that point on, my dad was just hooked on the concept of flight, and he always wanted to fly.

And so the Army Air Corps was just a logical extension of that.

[soft music] - [Narrator] Like many other children growing up in Depression-era Chicago, Charles Ozuk was the son of immigrants.

He joined the Army Air Corps for very practical reasons.

- I think there are two intersecting reasons why he joined the Air Force.

One was because he had just gone through the Depression.

His family had six children.

He was very determined to help his mother.

So joining the Air Force would give him three square meals a day, and he could send money home to his mother.

And I think also that people knew that the war was out there on the horizon, so he wanted to be prepared for that.

[emotional music] - [Narrator] An unprepared America was going to war.

80 young airmen would be asked to change that narrative.

The challenge is to see past old black and white images to discover the individuals who actually lived these stories.

Who better to tell them than their children, along with the children and grandchildren of the total strangers who rescued them, ordinary people who didn't see themselves as heroes?

- No, my father never would say, he would never call himself a hero.

He thought that the Americans, the pilots who he helped, those were the heroes.

He just thought of himself as just an ordinary person who did what any Chinese man would do in the same situation.

- [Narrator] Starting in 1931, Japan began occupying an ever-growing portion of China.

By mid-1941, seven million Chinese had already died.

China's leader was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

Chinese students rallied to urge him to fight against those who had invaded their homeland.

One of them was named Tung-Sheng Liu.

- There were student delegations that got together to try to meet with Chiang Kai-shek or members of the government to persuade him to prosecute the war more energetically.

And apparently my father was the leader of one of these student delegations, and he met with Chiang Kai-shek and some of his aides at one point and presented a sword to them and tried to ask them to do more to fight the Japanese.

[drumbeat] - [Narrator] American President Franklin Roosevelt presided over nothing but defeat in the months following Pearl Harbor.

Defeat and humiliation, like at a bleak Pacific outpost called Wake Island.

- [Commander Cunningham] Cunningham speaking.

I have a message for the President of the United States.

In the face of superiority, we were obliged to give up Wake Island.

Since our capture, we've been well-treated, and I wish to thank the people of the Japanese nation for their consideration.

- And Roosevelt knew that it was gonna take much of 1942 to enlist and train new troops, to build more battleships, more bombers, more bullets, more rifles.

And he knew that the initial nationalism that flared up in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor would be short-lived, and he needed to buy time.

And that was really the genesis foe why he pressured his senior military leaders to attack Tokyo.

- [Narrator] America's Commander-in-Chief had given an order, bomb Tokyo.

Tom Griffin, a navigator in the US Army Air Forces, had already proven he was ready for even the toughest missions.

- He was a boxer in college.

He had a pretty good career until one day, I think he was returning to the university, he had a terrible wreck and broke both ankles.

He was still in college.

And the first thinking was he wasn't gonna walk again properly, and he said, "Well, to heck with that idea."

- [Narrator] At the University of Arizona, a place where aspiring mining engineers studied, Herb Macia was a member of the school's football team.

- So he was there at the University of Arizona.

It was a land grant college by the way, and therefore, he took two years of ROTC, but he was famously or infamously the worst cadet known to man because, again, he was only interested in being a mining engineer.

But one day in the spring of 1939, his fraternity brothers said that the Air Corps recruiters were on campus, and they were giving people physicals for possible entry into the Air Corps as Cadets.

So this group of Kappa Sig fraternity brothers all go over and take the physical, and the only guy that passes is Herb Macia.

- [Narrator] It would be impossible for Navy aircraft to bomb Tokyo.

Getting close enough to Japan to launch them would result in the destruction of America's only aircraft carriers in the Pacific.

[soft music] [engine revving] Could longer-range Army land bombers be launched from a carrier?

[aircraft engine roaring] A 40-year-old aviation legend and newly recalled Army Reserve officer named James H. Jimmy Doolittle was put in charge of finding out.

- But Doolittle was, he was more than just a pilot.

He was an aeronautical visionary, if you will.

He earned a master's and a doctorate from MIT.

He also, during this early era of aviation, was one of the few pilots that was out there testing the bounds of what airplanes could do.

[soft music] - [Narrator] Doolittle, given the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, determined just one aircraft could fly this mission, a relatively new plane called the B-25 Mitchell bomber.

There weren't many pilots who could fly a B-25.

[soft music] Bill Bower could.

- By June or July of 1941, they introduced the new B-25 airplane.

And dad, because he was an experienced pilot and his squadron had the most experience in twin engine airplanes, they got the B-25.

So for the rest of that year, 1941, he was training in his B-25.

- [Narrator] Eglin Field in Northern Florida was miles away from anything and anyone, the perfect location to prepare young, all-volunteer aircrews for a top-secret mission.

[airplane engine roaring] - And Doolittle started planning the raid and realized he needed B-25s and also realized the best trained crews were out there in Washington.

So he had them all sent to South Carolina, and he talked to them.

Told them it was very dangerous.

They'd be out of the country.

It was top secret.

Anyone could back out anytime they wanted to after they'd volunteered.

They all stood up and said let's go, and they went down to Fort Walton Beach and Eglin Field.

- So in order to train them, they brought in a Navy fighter pilot who worked with them down at Eglin Air Force Base to try to teach these Army pilots how to be able to take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier.

And it was pretty intensive training, as you can imagine.

And not all of them were successful.

[airplane engine] - [Jim Bower] They spent four weeks, better part of four weeks, training on how to do short field takeoffs and how to do celestial navigation over water.

And also, most important, how to fly at treetop level for long periods of time at 160 miles an hour, which was probably stall speed for that airplane.

[airplane engine] - [Narrator] In late March 1942, the crews were ordered to the west coast and, along the way, told to fly as low as possible.

This is how Doolittle hoped his pilots could avoid detection flying to, from, and over Japan.

- [Jeff Thatcher] So they spent the next few days hedgehopping across the US, and my dad had some pretty funny stories to tell.

They were so low to the ground, sometimes they were buzzing automobiles, and people were jumping out of their cars in panic.

But anyway, on April 1st, they finally got out to San Francisco, and they flew under the Oakland Bridge.

[soft music] - [Narrator] America's newest aircraft carrier, the USS Hornet, would take the aircrews within about 450 miles of Japan.

[soft music] The targets the Raiders had been assigned included steel mills and factories, as well as military installations.

Some were in Tokyo.

Others in the city of Kobe, Nagoya, Osaka, Yokohama, and Yokosuka.

[soft music] Even if the bombers could successfully launch off the Hornet, they couldn't land on it.

Months earlier, the Chinese military had built landing fields in Eastern China.

The plan called for the American aircraft to arrive, be quickly refueled, then fly on to China's wartime capital, in 1942, called Chongqing, in distant Western China.

But Chiang Kai-shek, China's leader, thought it was a terrible idea.

He feared bloody retaliation by the Japanese military.

[soft music] On April 2nd 1942, Hornet and her escorts began their journey.

[soft music] Joined by a second carrier group, [roaring surf] what was now called Task Force 16 sailed west through the treacherous, stormy seas of the North Pacific.

[howling wind] By this point, the flyers had an unofficial name.

They were the Doolittle Raiders.

- Dad always maintained that when the Navy guys allowed them into their poker games, they cleaned the Air Force guys out, and he said, "We all took off flat broke.

Not that we needed anything."

But he said, "I didn't want to die.

I was flat broke and so was everybody else when we took off."

- [Narrator] Along the way, this iconic scene was filmed, Jimmy Doolittle attaching several Japanese medals awarded years earlier to US Navy personnel, to a 500-pound bomb, returning them to Japan.

- Now the problem was, on the morning of April 18th, the carriers were still about 1,000 miles away from Japan when they were intercepted by Japanese picket boats.

These picket boats were an early warning system, a trip wire, if you will, that the Japanese had set up to alert them in the case any Americans were sort of sneaking into their waters for an attack.

[suspenseful music] - [Narrator] Task Force 16 spotted a patrol boat about the same time it spotted them.

The small vessel was eventually sunk.

[explosion] Still, it was assumed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and Japan's Naval High Command had been warned.

- [James Scott] Of course, the discovery of Doolittle and his men put the entire mission at risk.

What were they to do at that point?

By the time that morning at daybreak, about the time they were deciding to take off, they were still about 800 miles away from Tokyo.

At 800 miles, there's no way that they would be able to take off, bomb Japan, and still be able to make it to China.

Taking off at that point was essentially a suicide mission.

- They're out in the mid-Pacific.

It's stormy, it's raining.

The swells in the ocean are about 10 to 15 feet with some swells being as high as 30.

They actually saw green water come over the flight deck as they were preparing to leave that morning.

[roaring surf] - They were launching about every three minutes.

Very rough seas.

The deck was pitching violently.

But I think they had something like a combined headwind, both natural wind and the ship's speed.

They had something like a 65 mile-an-hour headwind.

So that's one of the main reasons that all the planes lifted off very successfully.

[engine roaring] - [Narrator] This is the last surviving film footage of the Doolittle Raiders.

However, by using contemporary and period footage along with still images, it is possible to visually approximate what the Raiders and their rescuers experienced.

[engine roaring] We picked up radio stations on our radio compass.

The compass needle indicated that we were on course, so you can give the Japanese radio stations an assist in guiding us in."

[soft music] - [Narrator] The Raiders arrived at various places up and down Japan's east coast.

Not surprising, given their relatively crude navigational equipment.

[soft music] The first American aircrews wondered why there was no anti-aircraft fire.

Where were the Japanese fighter aircraft?

Admiral Yamamoto believed he could piece together a credible defense force.

He was ready for the Americans to arrive on Sunday, April 19, [soft music] but they would arrive on Saturday, April 18 instead.

[engine roaring] [soft music] The crews aboard the Japanese patrol boats, some later captured, didn't realize or didn't communicate that the Hornet was carrying longer-range land bombers.

[soft music] Doolittle could launch immediately far from the Japanese coast.

[soft music] In Tokyo and elsewhere, it seemed like a typical Saturday.

[soft music] - It's important to remember too that Tokyo was really one of the largest cities in the world.

It's an incredibly dense city as well.

So you have arsenals right next to schools, right next to apartment complexes, right next to factories, and it's all just crowded in there.

And when you're looking down on that at 250-300 miles an hour, you just see a sea of rooftops.

So coming in on your first combat mission over an incredibly dense city like that is a really tough thing for these inexperienced young airmen.

- Their target was the Nippon Shipping Works factory, and they were able to locate that.

And when they got over the target, they ascended the plane to about 14 or 1,500 feet.

Then subsequently dropped four bombs.

Three of them were 500-pound bombs, and the fourth one had 127 incendiary clusters on it.

And as soon as that was released, the clusters just went out all over the place, and once they hit the ground, they started small fires throughout Tokyo.

- [Narrator] Crew 14 saw a baseball game underway as they approached their first target, a military barracks in Nagoya.

- My dad in his immediate interview in Chongqing said it was extremely hard to pick up the targets.

The maps that they had been given were too small, too large a scale, I guess, and did not allow them to pinpoint targets very easily.

But the first target was a barracks complex around Nagoya Castle, and Nagoya Castle was an ancient structure.

And it was fairly visible.

It was a high building.

So they dropped their first bomb there on the barracks.

[engine roaring] They immediately came upon their second target, which was a petroleum storage warehouse.

They hit that.

They then had to adjust their course slightly to the left, and they hit their third target, which was the arsenal.

And then they had to steer right again and go quite a distance back down to Nagoya Bay, and they hit the Mitsubishi aircraft factory.

Just one bomb on each and they hit all their targets.

[soft music] - [Narrator] The anti-aircraft fire the Raiders encountered was ineffective.

Any fighter aircraft were chased off.

Not a single American aircraft was lost.

[soft music] 15 of the bomber crews were on their way south, then west to China.

But crew eight was so low on fuel that their only chance of survival was to fly north against orders to the Soviet Union.

Landing at a Soviet air base, they would be interned for 13 months.

[soft music] The other crews were short on fuel too.

- In a lot of ways, it's a miracle.

At least that's what a lot of the Raiders said at the time.

After they had bombed Japan and they were flying to China, most of them had no expectation that they were gonna be able to make it all the way to the mainland.

In fact, Jimmy Doolittle had told his crew that they were gonna try to ditch somewhere alongside maybe a fishing boat or something like that.

- Well, it's pitch dark.

Not only that, but there's a storm that's blowing behind him.

All the day, he's been fighting a headwind that's been slowing him down and making him use fuel, and he has already gone to his crew and said, "We're not gonna make it."

[dramatic music] - And as they're droning across, as their fuel levels are depleting, suddenly they get this huge tailwind that comes out of nowhere and helps push them across that last bit of ocean.

And the Raiders would later call that the hand of heaven.

[dramatic music] - [Narrator] The B-25 had a reputation for being a rugged aircraft that got their crews home.

But there are limits to everything.

[dramatic music] A beach on the coast of East China looked like a good place to land to crew seven.

They had named their aircraft the Ruptured Duck.

They were about to discover that this duck couldn't float.

- The engines suddenly seized up as they were almost to the beach, and they actually hit the waves about a quarter mile out from the beach on the ocean.

And the impact of the landing stopped the plane, immediately flipped it upside down, and it caused the four other crew members, the pilot, the co-pilot, the navigator, and the bombardier, to be thrown out through the front of the plane.

- [Narrator] Four of the five crew members were terribly injured.

Gunner mechanic David Thatcher escaped relatively unscathed.

The youngest and lowest ranking crew member, he was now in charge.

- Ted Lawson, the pilot, had a significant deep gash in his arm that went all the way down to the muscle.

He had most of his teeth knocked out.

But his worst injury was a slice to his left leg that went down to the bone.

Dean Davenport, the co-pilot, had some wounds to his head, and Charles McClure, the navigator, dislocated both of his shoulders from the impact.

Robert Clever, the bombardier, when he was thrown out through the nose of the plane, it almost tore his scalp off.

[music] Dad helped give the members of the crew some sustenance when they were traveling further inland 'cause he had a cup with him and he would collect rainwater, and he would move around to each member of the crew, give them sips of water.

Basically, he was kind of like their 24/7 nurse for those first few days, and he didn't get much sleep.

He was just extremely compassionate, very concerned about the crew.

- [Narrator] Other crews made it further inland.

The plan was to radio the Chinese airfields, then follow navigational beacons.

But the key equipment was never delivered, and the Chinese never told the Raiders were on their way.

[soft music] There were no radio beacons, no mechanics, no spare parts, no fuel.

[soft music] Most Raiders lacked any parachute training.

Still, with no place to land, the only alternative was to bail out.

- He popped his chute and literally hit the ground immediately.

Here he is in China.

It's raining.

He has no idea where he's at.

So he just rolls up in his chute and goes to sleep.

It's raining, it's really nasty weather.

He wakes up in the morning and he's in the fog.

He can't see what he's doing.

He gets up and decides he's gonna survey the area.

He goes over 10-15 feet, and he's standing on the edge of a 300-foot cliff.

- He was descending.

He was in white clouds.

As he described it, he said, "I wasn't sure I was falling."

In these white clouds, you don't have a sense of falling.

He finally looks down and he sees a black hole in the clouds, and the next thing he knows, that's the top of a mountain and he hits and lands pretty violently, and he's rolling down the mountain.

His parachute gets caught up in some little pine trees.

So he's stopped by that.

- My father landed.

His chute caught on the side of a mountain.

And it was dark and rainy, and so my father just hung there through the night.

It was probably around midnight, so he hung there for around eight hours.

And then when he woke up, he thought that he was up in heaven with Saint Peter because all he could see was fog down below him, and he was up in the mountains and didn't know where else he could be, except with Saint Peter.

But then he recognized that he was caught on the cliff.

[soft music] - [Narrator] The Raiders had arrived in a place where they didn't speak the language, without any food or equipment.

[soft music] They were being pursued by Japanese troops, but had no idea in what direction to go, or how they would travel 1,000 miles to safety.

[soft music] - The Raiders were incredibly dependent on the locals for help.

It's important to remember, most of these guys had never been outside of the country.

A lot of them had never been outside their state.

And so here they were bailing out over rural China.

[soft music] [soft music] [soft music] - [Narrator] Tung-Sheng Liu, now an engineering student at a well-known university, was visiting his future wife and her family in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

[soft music] He needed to be smuggled through the Japanese lines, so he could return to college in Western China.

The people smugglers he hired had different plans for this English-speaking student.

- They brought him to a place, [soft music] and they pushed him to a room, and he saw a lot of people in there, including five Caucasian guys, completely muddy and dirty and scared and not understanding anything anybody was saying and unshaven.

And he was like who are these people, and it turned out to be five American pilots who had just bombed Tokyo on April 18th 1942 and had landed nearby, landed their plane nearby and met up with some Chinese, but nobody could speak with each other because the Chinese couldn't speak English and the Americans definitely couldn't speak Chinese.

- [Narrator] While some had written Chinese words in their notebooks, nothing could replace an actual interpreter.

- Right away, he decided not only am I going to help them translate at this moment.

I think, at that moment, they were actually going to sit down and have a meal or something like that.

But he said, "China and America are allies in the war.

We were all on the same side.

So I should stay with these Americans, and I should help them as much as I can."

- Okay, so the morning of the 20th of April there in Guangfeng, the crew is together.

They've had something to eat.

They wake up.

They're taken by these soldiers and these four young men that appeared in a number of pictures to a bus station, and there's a car there and there's a bus.

They meet an official from the town of Shangrao, which is a much larger city about 30 or 40 miles away, and they're told they're going to be taken to Shangrao, which is the location of a large Chinese military headquarters.

- [Narrator] Travel westward for the Raiders was slow, deliberate, and dangerous.

- Some of them had to ride in sedan chairs, these bamboo things.

Some of them, they rode trains, they rode boats.

They had all kinds of different kinds of transport.

I think at one point they were in some kind of old truck.

[soft music] - [Narrator] Local elements of the Chinese military gathered the Raiders together in a rural area outside the city of Quzhou.

An air raid shelter had been carved out of a nearby hillside.

[soft music] The Raiders got to know it well.

- Every day the Chinese would come to their quarters and say, "Okay, there's going to be a Japanese air raid in 45 minutes.

So go to the bomb shelter.

We'll come over, there'll be three airplanes.

They're gonna drop 10 bombs.

And when they finish, we'll come back out."

He was amazed that the Chinese were getting that kind of intel from obviously other Chinese at the Japanese airfield, wherever it was, Shanghai or whatever, and knew exactly what was going to happen.

So that went on and they were there for a number of days, to the end of April.

- [Narrator] Not everyone escaped harm.

20-year-old Corporal Leland D. Faktor was killed during his bailout attempt.

[soft music] Crew six, in a plane they called the Green Hornet, was missing.

[soft music] Crew 16, aboard Bat Out of Hell, was missing too.

[soft music] Back in Washington, DC, no one had any idea of what was going on.

Japanese radio broadcasts were the first source of information.

[soft music] The USS Hornet, headed eastward, intercepted and logged the initial broadcast.

[soft music] In the United States, the reaction was immediate.

It was precisely the effect President Roosevelt anticipated.

In rural China, the Raiders knew none of this.

- The Chinese were so kind to give my father the space and the comfort that he needed.

Took care of him, washed his clothes, bandaged his wounds.

Fed him things he had never seen before, but he ate them.

Because the Chinese treated the Raiders so kindly, because the Raiders wanted to give back to the Chinese, they would give them bullets or buttons off of their uniforms.

My father gave that family a 1937 American penny as a souvenir.

[aircraft engine] - [Narrator] Why did people in rural China feel they had a duty to help these strange foreigners?

[aircraft engine] [aircraft engine] The Raiders eventually reached an airfield under Chinese control.

[aircraft engine] From there, an American transport aircraft would carry them to Western China, to free China, to safety, [aircraft engine] and then home.

- Of course, as you can imagine, Japan was furious.

Not only had their homeland been bombed for the first time in 2,600 years, but the Americans had managed to escape to China.

And Japan, of course, is at war with China at that point and occupied parts of China.

- [Narrator] Death and destruction were at the core of the Imperial Japanese Army's retaliatory campaign in East China.

Cities and towns were burned.

Rape was used as a weapon.

- They ultimately killed an estimated 250,000 Chinese men, women, and children, and some of them were killed in incredibly brutal ways.

Their ears and noses were cut off.

They were set on fire.

They were drowned in wells.

[soft music] - [Narrator] The Japanese military also weaponized various pathogens, like plague and cholera, for use in biological warfare.

[soft music] As Japanese forces withdrew from parts of East China, they left behind food containing these deadly microbes, food which would undoubtedly tempt hungry Chinese civilians, food that would sicken and kill.

[drumbeats] The war wasn't over for the Raiders who had eluded capture and survived their first combat mission.

By the end of the war, 19 Raiders had given their lives for their country.

19 of the 80 Raiders in this iconic scene didn't come home.

[dramatic music] The Hornet didn't survive the war either.

It was sunk six months after the Doolittle Raid.

But what of the missing crew of plane six, the Green Hornet, and the crew of plane 16, Bat Out of Hell?

[dramatic music] Two Raiders, Staff Sergeant William Dieter and Sergeant Donald Fitzmaurice, drown after crash-landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Eight men were captured and became prisoners of war.

First Lieutenant William Farrow, First Lieutenant Dean Hallmark, and Corporal Harold A. Spatz were executed.

The five remaining Raiders suffered beatings, torture, and starvation.

First Lieutenant Robert J. Meder died of malnutrition and preventable, treatable diseases.

First Lieutenant Chase Nielsen, First Lieutenant Robert L. Hite, and Corporal Jacob DeShazer were eventually liberated.

Second Lieutenant George Barr, rescued at the same time, required months of subsequent medical care.

[dramatic music] [upbeat music] Prosperous post-war America was literally a world away from World War II China.

The children of the Doolittle Raiders didn't fully understand what their fathers had done to shape history.

The same was true of the children of the Raiders' Chinese rescuers.

- Dad never told me anything.

He never said a word about what he did.

And he never did.

He never told stories or anything like that.

You actually had to sit in while he was talking to other people if you wanted to know anything.

- My father had his Army trunk up in the attic, and when he wasn't around, we would all take turns going through all his memorabilia, and we knew that he had done something important.

And when I was in grade school, 1957 to 1964, he allowed us, on the anniversary of the raid, he had a big green binder that I guess was given out at one of the reunions and had pictures of all the planes and everything about the raid.

He would let us take that to school, and the nuns were very impressed about who we were related to.

- He would give us little bits and pieces of the story.

And I told you about the card games on the Hornet and how they lost their money and some other little funny stories.

You would be forgiven if you thought that it must have been just a lark, that Tom Griffin and the boys were just larking around the world from one funny little happenstance to the next.

That's how he played it.

That's how he talked about it.

- I do distinctly remember that at Memorial Day, 1956, we went to Arlington Cemetery, and we went to the graves of the Raiders who had been killed as prisoners.

And I distinctly remember the name Lieutenant Farrow and seeing his grave there in Arlington.

[soft music] - [Narrator] America remembered the Doolittle Raiders thanks to a Hollywood film, "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," based on a book written by Ted Lawson, the pilot of the Ruptured Duck.

[aircraft engine roaring) - Four away!

[aircraft engine roaring) [soft music] - [Narrator] The actual Raiders gathered for annual reunions.

Jimmy Doolittle, now a successful corporate executive, saw to it that his men knew that he still appreciated the sacrifices they had made.

[soft music] That included Tung-Sheng Liu.

- So during this time, they were in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States.

And then one day my father opened up the newspaper, and there was an article in the paper and it said a group of men known as the Doolittle Raiders are having a reunion in the such and such hotel in Minneapolis.

So he said, "Oh, hey, that's great.

I'll go see them but, you know, I'll surprise them."

- [Narrator] At times, the reunions could become a bit boisterous.

Josephine Doolittle, Jimmy Doolittle's wife, had some thoughts about that.

- In April of 1962, Jo Doolittle, who is married to Jimmy Doolittle, decides that she's had enough of just the good old boys and their reunions, where they all just kind of sat around and traded stories.

She wants all the wives to come to the celebration, but in order to do that, you have to bring the kids too.

- It wasn't just the older generation of these male pilots getting together.

Their wives got together.

Their wives became friendly with each other.

The children grew up with each other.

The children became friends with each other.

And that was a very unusual, I would say a very unusual thing for these sort of World War II veteran groups.

- And my dad's best friend at the time was a guy named Robert Hite, who was one of the prisoners of the Japanese.

And so I got to sit down with Bobby Hite and listen to him tell of the 40 months he spent under the Japanese.

And it was very, it brings you to tears every time you think or even hear it, and I got to hear it firsthand.

And it was like, wow, this is great.

This is what I was waiting for.

This is the part of history I wanted to know.

[soft music] - [Narrator] The Doolittle Raid was remembered very differently in China.

The deaths of an estimated 250,000 civilians in East China were understandably hard to accept.

[soft music] 30,000 Chinese soldiers were killed or wounded.

The United States funded, trained, transported, and supplied the army of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek long after World War II had ended.

[soft music] 1949 saw a new Chinese leader and a new China.

Stories about heroic Americans certainly didn't fit the new narrative.

Still, memories of the Doolittle Raiders never disappeared completely in East China.

[soft music] For one family, those memories involved an American penny.

- The interesting thing about that penny is it reconnected my father with that family.

Because in 2009, my dad got a letter from a family in China saying that they were trying to know what happened to this Raider that they helped.

Was he still alive, did he remember?

And they sent him pictures of the penny.

They sent him pictures of the son, the oldest son, who now holds on to that penny.

And they sent him pictures of the bamboo chairs that they carried him in and things like that.

- [Narrator] At what became elaborate Raider reunions, there were conversations about some of the Raiders and their children going to China.

[aircraft engine] In 2005, Tom Griffin traveled there with other American veterans and his son John.

- The bus would go through towns, and they would read what was going on, the big banner on the bus, and they would start applauding.

So yeah, we were toast of the town.

Wherever we went, they just really turned out in force, and they couldn't get enough of those old guys.

It was just tremendous, just tremendous.

- [Narrator] Jeff Thatcher is president of a non-profit group called Children of the Doolittle Raiders.

- Actually, China was not on my radar.

But in July of 2015, I received a letter from the Chinese Ambassador to the United States inviting me and my father to come over to China for the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II celebration that they were planning in early September of that year.

- [Narrator] David Thatcher, because of his poor health, couldn't travel to China.

But thanks to Melinda Liu, who for many years was the Beijing Bureau Chief of Newsweek magazine, [soft music] Jeff Thatcher was able to visit the beach where his father saved the lives of the other crew members of the Ruptured Duck.

[soft music] - Well, I'm out on the beach and standing there, and I suddenly had an epiphany.

A wave of emotion just washed over me.

I suddenly became aware of what my dad had had to deal with.

The plane crash-landing, him being a stranger in a strange land, unable to communicate with these people.

And it was a really touching moment for me.

- [Narrator] He even met a woman who was using a piece of his father's aircraft as a cane.

[soft music] In the years after World War II, the United States and Japan, once bitter enemies, became trusted allies.

By 2018, relations between the United States and China were at an especially low ebb.

International trade was a continuing irritant just as it had been for years, [soft music] but now there were strategic issues as well.

American and Chinese military units often stalk each other in disputed areas of the South China Sea.

What kind of reception might a group of visiting Americans encounter in China?

[soft music] It turned out they were very welcome.

Volunteer historians, researching the story of the Doolittle Raiders in Jiangxi Province, were anxious to meet them.

- As I joined up with the CDR group and the children's group at Quzhou, a delegation from Shangrao came that I had not met when I was there, and that was Professor Luo and his group.

And I've maintained contact with him, and he's done tremendous research finding who these people were in the various pictures and family members, and we're still doing that.

We're still in the process of trying to find more information.

[soft music] - [Narrator] Multiple museums and memorials dedicated to the Doolittle Raiders can be found in East China, including the restored medical clinic where the crew of the Ruptured Duck were treated.

[soft music] - I met the son of the man who had saved my father.

The eldest son, everything goes through the eldest son over in China.

I met his brothers, his children.

[soft music] [aircraft engine] - [Narrator] Still, what impact did the Doolittle Raid really have?

The damage caused was minimal.

[soft music] There were unintentional civilian deaths as well.

[soft music] [footsteps] Yet it's undeniable that Japanese pilots and aircraft who might have battled US or Chinese forces were instead held back to defend Tokyo.

The largest impact was on the June 1942 battle for a mid-Pacific island called Midway.

[soft music] - It's important to look, though, at the lead-up to the Battle of Midway.

Because Admiral Yamamoto, who was the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, really felt that the strike on Hawaii had not been successful because America's aircraft carriers weren't there that Sunday morning.

And so he pitched an idea to lure those aircraft carriers back into battle so that he could finish the job that his forces had failed to do on December 7th, and Midway was his idea.

Midway at the time was a desolate, windswept coral atoll about 1,200 miles from Hawaii.

But it functioned as an important submarine and air base for the Americans.

It was essentially a priceless piece of Pacific real estate.

[aircraft engine] And he knew that if he attacked Midway, America would have no choice but to bring those aircraft carriers back into battle, and he could crush them and do the job that he had meant to do at Pearl Harbor.

- [Narrator] The American pilots who sank four Japanese aircraft carriers during the Battle of Midway fundamentally changed the Pacific War.

[soft music] Those pilots, like the Doolittle Raiders, didn't consider themselves heroes.

[soft music] The same is true for the unlikely group of Chinese men and women who rescued many of the Raiders.

- And some of the other Chinese were literally fishermen, farmers, part bandits.

They were totally not the people that you would expect to be able to get along with any kind of foreigner.

Some of them didn't even know what nationality these white guys were.

They thought, are they Japanese?

And they've never seen anybody like that before.

And yet, despite all those challenges and all those cultural differences, [soft music] they found a way to communicate, they found a way to move together, they found a way to escape, and they found a way to help each other.

- [Narrator] The bonds forged by the Children of the Doolittle Raiders had an unanticipated humanitarian impact in 2020.

[soft music] - In February of 2020, when the pandemic was raging in China, the Children of the Doolittle Raiders were contacted by our friends in the Quzhou municipal government, and they were desperate for personal protective equipment, PPE.

- [Narrator] CDR sent surgical masks, goggles, and gowns, along with $6,000 to their friends in China.

- And then, in April of 2020, I received a letter from the Quzhou municipal government.

Prior to that, they had sent me a heartfelt letter of thanks thanking the CDR for our efforts to get them their PPE.

Well, they wrote me a letter back in April and said, "Hey, we understand the pandemic's raging in the US.

We would like to reciprocate your earlier gesture of goodwill and provide you, the CDR, with PPE for whatever needs that you have."

I contacted the State of Arkansas and said, "Hey, we're going to be receiving a fairly significant shipment of thousands of surgical masks from the Quzhou municipal government.

We'd like to know if there's a need for those here in Arkansas."

Well, there obviously was.

PPE was in short supply at the time.

[soft music] - [Narrator] Jimmy Doolittle was awarded America's highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor.

All of the Raiders received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

David Thatcher was awarded the Silver Star.

[soft music] Still, time would do what enemy anti-aircraft fire and fighter planes couldn't.

It has taken the lives of all the Raiders and removed their story from public memory.

Today, most Americans don't know who the Doolittle Raiders were, what they did, or why it was important.

- When I left on that trip to China, I was sitting at O'Hare Airport and waiting to get on the plane and was talking to other people who were traveling to China too, asking them why they were going there, and they were going there just to tour and go around or go through China to someplace else.

And I asked them if they knew about the Doolittle Tokyo Raid and nobody knows anything about the Doolittle Tokyo Raid.

And they were my age.

So when I explained them about the Raid, I thought, well, I'm passing on history here.

- [Narrator] Restoring that memory is the mission of the children and grandchildren of the Raiders.

[soft music] Professor Luo Shiping and his volunteers are working to preserve these memories too.

[soft music] The Doolittle Raid shaped not just history, but the Raiders, their rescuers, and their families as well.

- Before that, he was a happy-go-lucky second lieutenant.

They were just having fun and being in the military and they got to fly an airplane all the time and they didn't really do anything.

And then literally right off the bat in the very, very first weeks of the war, he becomes a human.

He becomes a brave, courageous human being.

It shaped him.

It made him who he was because from that moment on, he was no longer a kid.

- I get emotional because I don't think I realized how much drama there was when I actually was small, was a child.

Had I realized it even 10 years earlier, I could have talked with my father a lot more about it.

It's sort of a bittersweet feeling to have all that history having happened to someone so close to me, but I didn't really take full advantage of it at the time.

[soft music] - [Narrator] The China which exists today is totally unlike the China the Doolittle Raiders experienced.

Yet this new China can trace its roots back to events that occurred decades ago [soft music] in the small towns and tiny villages of rural China.

- So I wanted to go there to say a thank you from my family to those people.

And when I left China in 2018, I announced that I came over with four nationalities, Polish, Czechoslovakian, French, and Irish, but I was going home with five because I added China to one of my nationalities.

[soft music] - [Narrator] It is probably safe to assume that the United States and the People's Republic of China will continue to disagree on virtually everything.

But one thing the American people and the Chinese people agree on is the heroism of the Doolittle Raiders and the courage of their Chinese rescuers.

- No matter how different the backgrounds, the cultures, the ethnic identities, the nationalities, the governments, that there's still ways for human beings to relate to each other and to help each other survive.

I think that's the legacy.

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