All the Gallant Men by Donald Stratton

Author:Donald Stratton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062645371
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

WE TRIED TO follow the war, especially the battles in the Pacific. We got bits and pieces from the nurses and from Frosty. There was a radio in the ward, and a newspaper circulated from bed to bed, so at least we were able to keep up. It didn’t look good. The Japanese were running amok through the South Pacific, bombing the daylights out of the Philippines, taking one island after another. They hit the Philippines, I learned, the day after they struck us at Pearl. And the Japanese kept coming at them until they backed our boys into a peninsula on the island of Luzon called Bataan. Many of our soldiers were sick, and many more were starved half to death. After three months of giving all they had, they had nothing left, and they surrendered. Some seventy-five thousand of our men and Filipino soldiers were taken captive.

It was a sad day when we heard the reports of the surrender, and it affected everyone in the ward. Nurses, too. But not all the news was depressing. In late April 1942, we heard about the “Doolittle Raid,” a daring strike on Tokyo led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle. “Doolittle’s Raiders” brought the fight right to the emperor’s doorstep. We found out later that President Roosevelt called his Joint Chiefs of Staff together a couple of weeks after the Japanese hit us, and he told them to come up with a plan to bomb the enemy capital. Tokyo! Good for you, Mr. President. And good for Doolittle and his Raiders.

The Japanese leaders had sold their people a bill of goods, claiming they were invulnerable. It was their destiny, and no one could stop them. Well, the Raiders sure gave them something to think about. It was a bold plan. They were to get an aircraft carrier as close as they could, then sixteen B-25s were to take off from its deck. B-25s! No one had ever flown a B-25 off a carrier before. They had to strip them down so they could carry extra fuel. Even so, they didn’t have enough to make it back to the carrier. They had worked the numbers, but no matter how they figured, the math was against them. Besides, it was one thing to fly a B-25 off the deck of a carrier; it was another thing to land one. The plan was to bomb Tokyo, then fly to China and hopefully land safely in friendly territory. It came at a cost—every one of those eighty men knew it but still went ahead. Three died during the mission or were never found. The rest ditched their planes over mainland Asia, as planned. Eight were subsequently captured by the Japanese and entered the enemy’s notorious prisoner-of-war system; half would not survive the experience. The sixty-nine remaining Raiders successfully made it to friendly territory in China; but they were scattered across the countryside, often in remote regions—facing the daunting task of finding their way home from the other side of the world.

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