National Affairs: The Hardest Thing Is Nothing

Three flyers climbed stiffly down from a C-47 transport at Chungking’s Seven Dragon Slope airdrome. They were thin, and their faces were old and unsmiling. To fresh young U.S. flyers on the field, they seemed like apparitions from another war, another age. They had only now ended a flight begun from the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet three years, four months and one week before. They were some of Jimmy Doolittle’s men who had bombed Japan.

Back at last, they did what any bomber’s crewmen do at the end of a mission: they told what had happened to their targets. Two of them, Lieut. Robert I. Hite of Earth, Texas and Sergeant Jacob de Shazer of Madras, Ore., had fired fuel tanks and factories in Nagoya. Lieut. C. J. Nielsen of Hyrum, Utah had flown over Tokyo, seen his plane’s bombs explode in steel mills and a foundry.

Darkness & Fog. After their capture, they had lived in a cheerless, timeless, maddening limbo. They were occasionally moved from prison to prison. Nielsen was court-martialed, condemned to death, reprieved. That, at least, was exciting. Otherwise, there had been nothing to do. nothing to read, no mail, no Red Cross packages. Said Nielsen: “Nothing is the hardest thing in the world to do.”

They spent long periods in solitary confinement. Finally the Japs brought them hot water, gave them a shave and a haircut, and told them the war was over. They did not know what to believe; they had heard no news since leaving the Hornet. Finally, a U.S. rescue team parachuted down, took them out of their Peiping cells.

Now Chungking was wonderland. They marveled at hot-water faucets. They ate—roast pork and lemon pie, tomato soup and mashed potatoes. They slept in soft beds. Then, at week’s end, they started on their heroes’ trek home.

U.S. veterans of Wake Island and Bataan also emerged from Jap prison camps last week. They listened almost dazedly to the conversation of U.S. medical men. They had no inkling of the fact that the U.S. had 12,000,000 men under arms and that Germany and Japan had surrendered. They did not even know they had a President named Harry Truman. Asked one puzzled soldier: “What do you mean by G.I.?”