Last Mission to Tokyo: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice by Michel Paradis

Author:Michel Paradis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Genocide & War Crimes, History, Japan, Military, Political Science, United States, World War II
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-07-28T03:00:00+00:00

Fellows gave the draft back to Bodine to look over. There it was in three pungent points. It started the right way and followed the rule of three. But could Bodine really say all of that in open court? Did it have to be him? It was not as if the Japanese had been all that innocent to begin with.

Fellows was unwilling to be timid. Dwyer and Hendren had made the case about the Doolittle Raid, and with senior Army Air Forces officers sitting as judges, avenging the young airmen lost in the Air Forces’ most celebrated mission was not hard to sell. If the prosecution had built its case on a legend, the defense needed to make the case about the truth, wherever it led. They would have to put cracks into the mystique of the Doolittle Raid. If they could get McReynolds and the rest of the judges to harbor even small doubts about what had actually happened on April 18, 1942, they might just well create enough doubt about the guilt of the four men whose lives were now in their hands.

As defense lawyers, they had to be brave enough to fight for the truth. That was their duty. And if they were going to go down this road, Bodine had to be the one to lead the way. Kumashiro and Somiya certainly couldn’t do it; it would just be written off as Japanese propaganda. Fellows couldn’t do it, either. It would be seen as the same kind of tricks Frank Reel had pulled in Yamashita’s case all over again. The question in everyone’s mind would be why Bodine hadn’t done it. Bodine was a pilot, just like McReynolds, just like Nielsen. If anyone was going to speak an unspeakable truth, it should be him.

But how could they even prove it? Bodine had tried to get Nielsen to admit that at least some of the raid had been directed at residential areas, but Nielsen had not budged. The photos Bodine had taken at Mizumoto Elementary School had not turned out, meaning that to prove their case, Bodine and Fellows would have to personally testify about what they had seen in Japan. Bodine would have to be sworn in as a witness in a US Army courtroom and vouch for Imperial Japan’s most slanderous propaganda. It would be an act of career-ending heresy, all to help four men who were not free of guilt to begin with.

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