The Dispatch: More from CWR...

Men such as these: A Memorial Day reflection

It was the Psalms, the Hebrew prophets, and the Gospels that inspired in these men a life-sustaining hope.

Arlington National Cemetery (Image: J. Amill Santiago/Unsplash.com)

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.

(This essay was originally posted on May 27, 2015.)


If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!

Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.


About George Weigel 520 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

4 Comments

  1. 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 )

  2. 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.

2 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

  1. Men such as these: A Memorial Day reflection – Via Nova
  2. Men such as these: A Memorial Day reflection | Franciscan Sisters of St Joseph (FSJ) , Asumbi Sisters Kenya

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

All comments posted at Catholic World Report are moderated. While vigorous debate is welcome and encouraged, please note that in the interest of maintaining a civilized and helpful level of discussion, comments containing obscene language or personal attacks—or those that are deemed by the editors to be needlessly combative or inflammatory—will not be published. Thank you.


*