Books: Material for an Epic

THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO—Ted W. Lawson—Random House ($2).

After Pearl Harbor, 24 Army Air Forces officers were called together in a hotel in Minneapolis. Volunteers were wanted for a “dangerous, important and interesting” mission. No other information was forthcoming. All 24 volunteered.

By roundabout routes, they flew to Eglin Field, Fla. Lieut, (now Captain) Ted Lawson picked up four men on the way. There was matter-of-fact Dean Davenport, co-pilot (“I liked the way he flew”), Charles McClure, navigator, Bob Clever, bombardier, and David Thatcher, gunner-engineer. “Without realizing it, I had picked my crew. . . .” The crews, swelled to 140 men, crowded the Operations Office to hear Major James Doolittle: “If you men have any idea that this isn’t the most dangerous thing you’ve ever been on, don’t even start this training period. … If you’ve guessed where we’re going, don’t even talk about your guess.”

Lieut. Lawson was so eager to get going that the intensive training (“Our planes were in the air at 7 a.m. each morning and sometimes we’d still be at it at 10 p.m.”) did not bother him. He thought the B-25 (North America’s medium-range Mitchell bomber, stripped of its radio, bottom gun-turret and Norden bombsight) was a lively ship.

Shangri-La. One afternoon at the end of March, 16 B-25s were spaced trimly over the aircraft carrier Hornet’s flight deck. Off on either side steamed cruisers and destroyers. The next morning, Doolittle told them officially what the mission was, gave them choice of city: Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, Magoya. They were to land at small Chinese airfields, refuel and meet at Chungking. It would be single-file, hit-&-run, each crew on its own. “If we all get to Chungking, I’ll throw the biggest goddamn party you ever saw.”

The morning of April 18 was bitterly cold and rough. Off to the left, a cruiser let go a broadside. “A low-slung ship began to give off an ugly plume of black smoke.” U.S. gunnery had gotten a small Japanese ship within three minutes. But three minutes is time enough to flash a warning. It would no longer be a night attack at 400 miles, but a daylight raid at 800. Lawson heard the shout: “God damn! Let’s go!” They went.

At 2 that afternoon, Lawson and his crew sighted the coast of Japan. Flying in at low level they saw fruit trees in bloom, neat farms fitting into each other, farmers at work. It took iron control to pass up “the biggest, fattest-looking aircraft carrier” the crew ever saw. Every inch of shoreline was wharf, crowded with yachts and heavy ships. They flew low over the roofs toward the first of their chain of four targets. Four times the red light on the instrument board blinked, as each bomb was released. Lawson looked back once, saw a steel smelter “puff out its walls and then subside and dissolve in a black-and-red cloud.”

Descent to Hell. Showers splattered the windshields when the ship was over halfway across the China Sea. At 500 ft. the sea was completely blotted out. In the thick weather cigarets lost their taste. That night, eerie, peaked islands rose up at them out of the mist. They were flying blind and praying that they would see the islands in time. When Lawson decided to climb and fly in on instruments and then jump (it meant losing the plane), they ran into a hole in the weather, saw a clean, concave beach. Lawson dropped low, dragged the beach, inspecting it for logs. It was all right. Co-Pilot Davenport called off the airspeed. Suddenly both engines coughed. They were a quarter-mile offshore when they hit.

Lawson sat in his pilot seat on the sand, under 15 ft. of water. His nerveless hands reached down, unbuckled the seat strap and his pneumatic life belt brought him to the surface. Too paralyzed to swim, he was lifted and dropped by the waves. Dimly he saw the two tail rudders “sticking up out of the water like twin tombstones.” At last a wave carried him in far enough so that he could crawl up on the beach.

When Lawson stood up, his legs felt numb. He walked around in circles in the driving rain. His oaths were strange and thick. His upper teeth were bent in. He put his thumbs behind them and tried to push them straight. They broke off in his hands. He tried the lower teeth—they came off in his hands too. He stood in the rain with a handful of wet teeth and gum. Davenport came up to him, held Lawson’s head back, said: “God damn! You’re really bashed open. Your whole face is pushed in.”

Vaguely they realized that two other men were on the beach. They stumbled over. McClure was cut, dazed and groaning. Clever was on his hands and knees with his head hanging down between his arms, the water coming in a few inches above his knees. They could hear the sound of his blood falling into the water. Then Thatcher walked up out of the sea. They were together, the five of them.

Return to Reality. What happened after that to Lieut. Lawson and his crew happened also to the crews of the other planes. Battered, in physical agony and in agony of spirit, helpless, harried by Japanese planes searching for them from the air and Japanese patrols racing after them on land, the American flyers were lifted up, comforted and carried to safety by a force they did not understand.

Lawson can only call it “the incomprehensible machinery of Chinese aid.” But it was not machinery. A chain of human beings, protective, silent, efficient, carried them from one hiding place to an other. For almost two months, Lawson and his crew were handed across a vast stretch of China by litter, flatboat, junk, stretcher, sedan chair, charcoal-burning truck, bus, station wagon, train, plane. Most of the time, young Dr. C., indefatigable, kind, intelligent, was at their side. Several days after the raid he had walked all night, 26 miles, and all day, 26 miles back, to bring the American flyers to his father’s hospital. “He was the most loyal man I ever met.”

Dr. C. gave them a temporary haven. A swelling on Lawson’s ankle had gone up to the knee. Three days later, the crew of another B-25 straggled in, and with them Flight Surgeon Doc White, who went to work on Lawson with blood transfusions. Dr. C. was forever poking a needle into Lawson’s arm until his veins cowered. And then one day Lawson could no longer stand the scissoring away of the dead flesh.

“You’ll either take it or you’ll lose the leg.”

Lawson told Doc White, “For Christ’s sake, take the leg.”

He was given a spinal shot. He saw the doctor’s arm moving, his own leg lifted, the blood vessels tied off. Four times Lawson looked at the silver saw in White’s hand. He could hear the teeth cutting through thicker and thinner parts.

“Then there was an almost musical twink, and deep, deep silence inside me.” He watched one nurse take hold of an ankle, another nurse take hold of the thick end, saw them carry a leg out of the door.

It was a month after the raid when the Japanese got too close and the flyers had to move out of Dr. C.’s hospital. Somehow the Chinese always came up with a vehicle, hurried them on their way. At Choo Chow Lishui (where Lawson had planned to land after bombing Tokyo) the airport was blown up. At Nanching the field was destroyed. They pulled into Hengyang, pushed on to Kweilin. The Flying Tigers had already moved off.

Twelve planes came over the next day—Japanese. A few days later a DC-3 landed. Lawson cried when he saw old flying classmates and good friends.

Because Thirty Seconds is the most striking record of the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, it will reopen arguments of what was gained, what lost, by that bold adventure. Captain Lawson’s book will not settle the dispute. Readers may feel, however, that it settles more important matters. It leaves no doubt about the fighting, tough, quietly heroic qualities of U.S. flyers; even less doubt that the Chinese are a unique, agelessly wise, able and benevolent people.