Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (69 page)

The embassy cabled McCabe’s report on the raiders to Secretary of State Hull on November 30. “Based on Soviet standards the food, housing and heating conditions are excellent. Winter clothing issued by the Soviets was not adequate but the military commander at Okhansk has promised the immediate issue of better clothing from Molotov. Except for moderate vitamin deficiencies the health of the crew is satisfactory,” McCabe wrote. “Morale is still excellent due to the outstanding leadership displayed by Major York, although continued inactivity, especially during the winter, is causing a decline. The Soviet attitude toward the crew is very friendly.”

McCabe unofficially warned that the continued idleness would prompt the raiders to try to escape, which would create an embarrassing situation. “It would be desirable if some way could be found for the internees to be assigned some useful work. He also states that they have expressed the desire for a transfer to a more southerly climate since all of them are from the southern part of the United States,” the report noted. “It might be possible during some of the conversations which are taking place between American and Soviet military authorities for the American representatives to propose that the internees be released on parole for work with the Soviet Air Force in the Caucasus.”

Heavy black coats arrived a week later, made from reversed goatskin and cheap black dye that would soon leave the raiders ink stained.

“Looks like we’re here for the winter,” Emmens said.

“Was there any doubt in your mind before he brought us this stuff?” York quipped.

One local froze to death on the road near the house as the temperatures dipped below zero. Food grew scarce. The raiders lived off little more than cabbage and black bread, causing York’s weight to drop from 180 pounds to just 135. Nothing
was ever wasted, a scene best captured after the locals secured several chickens. “We turned down the heads and the feet, but the women in the kitchen ate the feet and the heads, cracked them open and ate the brains,” Emmens recalled. “They ate so many of the insides of the chicken that I didn’t realize existed—lungs, of course, the gizzard and the liver, little round things that are kidneys, I guess, about as round as the end of your little finger. They made the most of chicken that I have ever seen made.”

The airmen battled lethargy as time seemed to stand still, the days and even weeks blurring together. The fliers would sleep all afternoon yet lie awake at night, struggling to summon enough energy at times even to study or read. In a desperate effort to fight off boredom, the men held a contest to see who could catch the most rats, tormenting the captured rodents for amusement. “We would stake a live one outside in the snow—the things you think of—and tie a piece of thread around its legs so it couldn’t get away and the stake on the ground; give it about 1½ or two feet,” Emmens recalled. “It would scramble around on top of the snow, and a bird or a hawk or something would come down and grab it and take off with it. What else did we do?”

Even these diversions failed to help. “Our spirits had reached an unbelievable depth. It was difficult to realize that we had been in the country as long as we had,” Emmens wrote. “My son would be seven months old on the eighteenth of December. I wondered what he looked like.” Thanksgiving passed with little notice, but the approach of Christmas felt different as homesickness exacerbated the airmen’s daily miseries. “On one of the trips to the forest for wood, we brought back a Christmas tree,” Emmens recalled. “It was a small one, but we decorated it with bits of cotton and put it on the table. Somehow, it helped our morale just a bit.”

Mike, the interpreter, brought a filthy Gypsy woman home, and at night the raiders would listen to him having sex with her in his room, which further eroded morale. “Our gums were bleeding whenever we brushed our teeth. We found that we could even spit blood by just sucking on our gums,” Emmens later wrote. “Our skin was dry and flaky. We were all losing weight. And our morale was pretty well shot.”

Hungry, exhausted, and desperate to escape the frozen wasteland, York proposed writing a letter directly to Stalin.

“Are you serious?” Emmens replied.
“What makes you think a letter would even reach him?”

“Maybe it wouldn’t,” York replied. “But it’s like everything else—we won’t know until we try.”

Emmens asked what he planned to tell him.

“Exactly what we think! We’ll tell him we want to get out,” he said. “If he can’t arrange that, we ask him to move us to a warmer climate and to put us to work.”

York soon sat down and started a lengthy letter. “You don’t know about us, of course,” he wrote. “We are a trained combat crew, and we are not doing anybody any good. We could be fighting against our common enemy.” York suggested several possible courses of action, including simply releasing the airmen. After such a long time the release could be done with certain secrecy. If that was not an option, York suggested that the fliers be allowed to fight alongside Russian forces or at a minimum to work in some other capacity that might take advantage of their skills, preferably somewhere warmer. Mike helped the raiders translate the letter.

“I will mail it at once,” he said.

“I think he will too,” York told Emmens, “because I think he would be afraid not to—a letter addressed to Stalin.”

January proved a long and bitter month. “We never stopped hoping to hear from the embassy, that someone was coming, that we might be leaving, that the medicine we had asked for might arrive, that the clothing might arrive—anything,” Emmens wrote. “But nothing came.” By February the days began to warm up to zero degrees. The icy river, long frozen solid, started to break up. The raiders talked openly of escaping that spring, planning which boat to steal and how best to travel south, aiming to leave sometime between the middle of April and the middle of May.

“God, won’t it be a day, the day we leave this goddamned place,” York said one afternoon, as he and Emmens watched the ice float downriver.

“We don’t know when we are leaving this place, but we do know that someday we will,” Emmens said. “Think of all these people around us. They’ll never get out.”

The raiders were continuing to prepare for the spring escape when a well-dressed Russian captain and major arrived from Moscow late in the morning of March 25. The major removed
a document from his briefcase.

“This letter was received in Moscow a short time ago,” the Russian officer announced. “Did you write it?”

York confirmed.

“We are here to tell you that the first of your requests cannot be granted. That is the request to be released from the Soviet Union,” the major said, a smile stretched across his face. “But our government has decided to grant you the second two requests. You will be moved to a warmer climate and you will be allowed to work.”

York translated the news for the others.

“Ee-ow-ee!” Herndon shouted.

“You have been here for many months,” the major continued. “When can you be ready to leave?”

“Ready?” York asked, still floored by the news. “I couldn’t believe my ears,” he later recalled. “I could be ready in five minutes.”

The raiders gathered up their few belongings and then sat down with the Russian officers for a final meal of black bread, tea, and cabbage.

“Where are we going?” York asked.

“In due time you will know everything.”

THE AIRMEN SET OFF
around four that afternoon with the Russians in a motorcade of four cars, thrilled after seven months to finally see the dismal village of Okhansk disappear in the rearview mirror. Snow fell as the Russians drove through the afternoon and evening to the city of Molotov, a journey that took twelve hours and several spare tires to cover barely a hundred miles. In Molotov the officers checked the raiders into a hotel. “We had to walk up. The elevators didn’t run, but the walls were still red plush; the old gaslight fixtures were still there but didn’t burn any more,” Emmens recalled, “evidence of a more luxurious time way back when the czars lived.”

The major took the airmen’s chest, waist, and shoe measurements and outfitted them in Russian uniforms, complete with felt boots, fur caps with the red star insignia on the front, and shirts with buttons emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. The major informed the raiders that he had tickets for them that evening to see the Leningrad Ballet perform
Swan Lake
. The return to civilization proved
startling. “At the end of the ballet we stood up with the rest of the audience and applauded,” Emmens later wrote. “The ballerina took her curtain calls gracefully, and each time she came out, after first bowing to the audience, she came over and made her special bow to our box.”

After several days the Russian officers escorted the raiders to an airport for the flight south to the city of Chkalov, located northeast of the Caspian Sea. The airmen looked down as the plane approached, amazed to see camels on the ground below, a sense of wonderment bested only by the discovery of the first and only flush toilet the fliers would see in Russia. “Chkolov presented the same dismal picture that every other place had,” Emmens recalled. “The same ragged people trudged along in silence. There were no stores, no signs of business, as we know the meaning of the word. Doorways and windows of what had apparently once been stores were boarded up.”

After spending a few days in Chkalov, which included a night at the opera, the raiders climbed aboard a train. Unlike the passenger car on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, this one had red carpet on the floor and red plush seats. “Well worn,” Emmens noted, “but not worn out yet.” The train chugged south for eight days through Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as the temperatures rose and vendors held up various fruits at each stop. York shared a compartment with a stocky young Russian named Kolya, who welcomed the opportunity to practice his English. Kolya oversaw lend-lease supplies imported through Iran, and beneath his seat he carried suitcases loaded with Spam, Maxwell House coffee, and, of course, vodka, which he gladly shared with the raiders.

“Where are you going?” Kolya asked at one point.

“We haven’t the faintest idea,” York answered.

“That’s typical of my country, especially with strangers.”

York never missed an opportunity to press his new friend for help with escape, though Kolya always demurred, arguing that he was sympathetic to the interned raiders, but reluctant to go against the wishes of his government.

“You must be patient,” Kolya advised. “You will fight again.”

The train pulled into the station in Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, separated from neighboring Iran by rugged mountains with peaks that reached as high as ten thousand feet. The raiders bid farewell to Kolya, who also disembarked, and climbed
into several cars, driving to a small adobe house surrounded by a high mud fence. The airmen’s primitive new home consisted of a couple of rooms, one with two beds, the other with three, all-iron cots, each with a single blanket but otherwise void of mattresses, sheets, and pillows. The property’s only water came from a spigot in the backyard; a hole in the ground shielded by a three-sided wooden fence served as the toilet.

“I had nothing to do with choosing this place,” the embarrassed major confessed to the raiders.

“Home sweet home!” Emmens said. “We sure went from bad to worse.”

York was less politic.

“These bastards!” he exclaimed. “These dirty, goddamned bastards!”

The major soon departed. A local officer would check on the airmen each night, and an elderly and toothless groundskeeper would prepare meals for them. The raiders climbed aboard a bus each morning starting on April 10 and headed to work in a local factory that specialized in overhauling two-wing trainer planes. The factory’s foreman put York and Emmens to work dismantling a plane fuselage, while Herndon and Pohl cleaned instruments and Laban worked on small engines. The workday ran from 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., interrupted by a morning and afternoon break as well as an hour-and-a-half lunch that consisted of bread and noodles, measured out by the gram.

The only information of the outside world came from a newspaper, posted on the factory’s bulletin board, which the airmen perused daily. In that paper York and his crew read about President Roosevelt’s release of details of the Tokyo raid as well as the fact that the Japanese had executed some of the airmen. “This news was a shock to us,” Emmens later wrote. “It made us feel ashamed of complaining about our lot. But it did not lessen our determination to get out of the Soviet Union.”

Kolya knocked on the door one night soon after the raiders settled into Ashkhabad, beginning a series of clandestine meetings with the Americans, often at his house over dinner. Each time the raiders pressed upon him their desire to escape, wearing Kolya down over several weeks. “Very well,” he finally told them. “I can help you and I will. You must place yourselves completely in my hands.” Kolya warned the raiders to be patient and under no circumstances try to escape alone. “The border is manned by Russian troops, dogs
, mines, and barbed wire,” he said. “You cannot do it alone. Do not try!”

Kolya’s offer to help thrilled the airmen, as best noted by Emmens: “Our spirits rose to the heavens.” That spike in morale soon waned as several days passed and then a week. Koyla told the men his initial plan had collapsed, cautioning the raiders to remain patient and not to try to escape on their own. The airmen’s frustration came to a head at dinner one night at Kolya’s house when Laban drank too much.

“Sergeant, why don’t you eat something?” York said. “You’ll feel better.”

The inebriated airman instead stood up at the dinner table and exploded at Kolya. “You and that goddamn boss of yours named Stalin can go piss up a rope,” Laban shouted. “You are nothing but a bunch of goddamn SOBs.”

“Laban,” York said, jumping to his feet with clenched fists. “Shut up.”

“And you,” the sergeant countered, turning to address his commanding officer, “you SOB, can go to hell.”

York shot a glance at Emmens. “You and Herndon and Pohl get Laban out of here,” he demanded. “Take him home.”