Like most denizens of Washington, I pay too little attention to the sites other Americans make sacrifices to visit. Earlier this month, though, prompted by reading James Scott’s Target Tokyo, a comprehensive history of the famous Doolittle Raid of April 18, 1942, I strolled through Arlington National Cemetery in search of three graves.
They were in Section 12, side-by-side, each marked with a headstone identical in its simplicity to so many thousands of others: William G. Farrow, Dean E. Hallmark, Robert J. Meder. Hallmark was the pilot of the sixth B-25 to take off from the pitching deck of USS Hornet, seventy-three years ago; Meder was his co-pilot on the plane they dubbed Green Hornet. Farrow was the pilot of Bat Out of Hell, the last of the sixteen planes to roar down the flight deck of what President Franklin Roosevelt later called “our secret base at Shangri-La.”
Captured in Japanese-occupied China, Hallmark and Farrow were shot by their captors on October 15, 1942, after months of torture and deprivation and a bogus “trial”; Meder died of starvation in a Japanese prison on December 11, 1943.
All three were cremated, their names deliberately falsified on the urns that bore their ashes. The urns were properly identified after the Japanese surrender and returned to the United States, where they now rest, sheltered under a tree, down the hill from the equally simple grave of the flyers’ commander, Jimmy Doolittle.
Target Tokyo is harrowing in its description of what these men, and four of their fellow airmen whose death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, suffered in Japanese prisons. One day, however, the imprisoned Doolittle Raiders were given an old Bible, which they began to share, taking turns reading in their cells.
As Carroll Glines, another historian of the Doolittle Raid, writes, “Up to this time, each man resorted to various methods to pass away hundreds of lonely hours….[But] it was the Bible, they admitted unanimously later, that had a profound impact on their respective outlooks…None of the four men would have called himself religious, and none had ever read the Bible through before…[Yet] they attributed their survival to the message of hope they found in its tattered pages.”
That hope, I suspect, would not have been nourished so well, had the imprisoned, emaciated Raiders been given The Origin of Species or the Critique of Pure Reason; a death-defying hope might not even have been nurtured by David Copperfield or Pride and Prejudice. It was the Psalms, the Hebrew prophets, and the Gospels that inspired in these men, living under extremities of cruelty that beggar the imagination, a life-sustaining hope; a willingness to forgive their captors; gratitude to God for their survival—and for one, a new vocation.
Jacob DeShazer, the bombardier on Farrow’s plane, became a Methodist missionary, returned to Japan, and converted Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese pilot who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, to Christianity.
Where did America get men like the Doolittle Raiders?
Jimmy Doolittle was already a world-famous pilot (with a doctorate from MIT) when he talked his way into leading the raid that will forever bear his name. The seventy-nine other Raiders were known to few others except their families, friends, and fellow–soldiers. The Hollywood gloss of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo notwithstanding, they weren’t all handsome, and they weren’t angelic. But they believed their country was worth defending, and that its defense was worth risking their lives on a volunteer mission that wasn’t even disclosed to them until Hornet passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, steaming west in harm’s way.
I think it’s safe to say that none of the Doolittle Raiders thought America an ill-founded republic or the source of the world’s ills, although many of their families had struggled through the Great Depression. They were brave men and patriots, the products of an imperfect but intact public culture that nurtured millions of heroes like them.
Standing under that tree in Arlington, I could only wonder what Bill Farrow, Dean Hallmark, and Bob Meder might say about American culture today.
(Editor’s note: This essay was originally posted on May 27, 2015.)
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During the occupation of Atlanta, Sherman wrote to city officials that “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Years later, he summarized further: “War is hell.”
About hell, and not unrelated to the Doolittle raid on Tokyo was the Japanese immediate Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign which resulted in 300,000 Chinese deaths. It is maintained that the included 250,000 civilian deaths were reprisals against Chinese villagers for aiding the Doolittle flight crews who had crash landed in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid and https://www.pbs.org/perilousfight/battlefield/doolittle_raid_midway/
The very amateur historian Henry Ford was onto something when he dismissed systematic history entirely as just “one damn thing after another.” Yours truly, another amateur, simply admits to being overwhelmed by the incalculable pivot points within “history”… AND…by the alarming and singular historical fact that the Second Person of the Triune God would take it upon Himself to suffer and to resurrect ALL of this—large and small—within Himself…
(Writing here as having served 1968-70 on the successor USS Hornet, CVS-12, 1943-70; and as honorary pallbearer at Arlington National Cemetery in 2006 for its last commanding officer, Rear Admiral Carl J. Seiberlich—a devout Catholic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_J._Seiberlich )
History’s complicated & Sherman’s not my hero but he had a good point. He of all people should know about that.
God bless you, and thank you for your service.
The saddest part of American Culture today.Is that the current generation.And several
right behind it.Never heard of the Doolittle Raid.America’s true history.Has been scrubbed away in Academia.The destruction of Statues,and ruinest vandalism on our past
history is not by accident.
We sleep well, because rough men during the night stand by ready to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
In Remembrance..,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0hCTyzeMiEY&ra=m
And our flag was still there.
They gave their lives in many wars to preserve our democracy. I would suggest that we visit Arlington National Cemetery on Columbia Pike. Sadly, the entrance to the cemetery was expanded in 2023 to allow for more than 80,000 new graves.
The United States was never constituted as a “democracy”, but a democratic republic.
And as a practical matter, without notice, let alone a vote, the nation has been transformed from a place where the responsible elected, should they displease the people that elected them can be replaced, to an inverse where the elected alienate their responsibilities to judges and bureaucrats and that cabal are displeased by the people, so they are replacing them, through the bribery of panem et circenses, ignorance and replacement.
All hail the kleptocratic administrative superstate!
The best honor for those dead is a prayer for the repose of their souls. I doubt humanity will ever develop a distaste for blood.
I wonder how many boys that died on Omaha Beach 82 years ago are saying “I have up my life so the UK could become an Islamo-fascist state, where speech is suppressed by means Hitler could have only dreamt about?”
And our flag is still there. Let freedom ring.
God bless our fallen heroes and their families.
This is what the Pope etc. should remember but will not, with their vapid statements for peace, etc. The nation we live in was made possible because courageous men went to war and won. They did not babble about peace. The won the peace with their arms and their valor. And the Pope still has a Vatican and a CC because of the great warriors who fought and died for Christ and for their culture and their wives and children and fellow Christians. Remember that, Pope etc. See historian R. Ibrahim, Defenders of the West. The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam.
https://www.amazon.com/Defenders-West-Christian-Heroes-Against/dp/1642938203
Ibrahim is not a serious historian. One would be better served by turning to anything associated with Hubert Jedin.
Look at all the serious scholars who praise his book. Avoid reading posts in the left wing wikipedia, reddit, etc.
Unfortunately, we live in a world of Islamic fanatics, gangster dictators and others.
Please see this eye-opening interview on the Legacy of Islam in Africa with Dr. John Allembillah Azumah. Azumah’s academic career includes serving as the Professor of World Christianity & Islam and Director of International Programs at Columbia Theological Seminary (2011–2019) and as the Founding Executive Director of The Sanneh Institute at the University of Ghana (2019). He has also held visiting positions at prestigious institutions such as Yale Divinity School, the Henry Martyn Institute in India, and the Akrofi-Christaller Institute in Ghana.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjsLmv1N7i4&t=80s