As a museum to the Doolittle Raiders opens, family members visit Chinese villages that rescued the airmen after the 1942 US attack on Tokyo
Weeks ago, in the cool of late October, Thomas Macia finally saw the mountainous land and village homes of Gangfeng county in Jiangxi province he had heard about all his life, territory his father would describe in stories from the second world war.
It was there James Macia, a B-25 navigator, had to bail out and parachute into the rainy night of April 18,1942 – just hours after bombing Tokyo in the Doolittle Raid, the first-ever air attack on Japan’s home islands, and a turning point in the United States war in the Pacific.
James Macia and his four fellow airmen of Crew 14, including one who was injured, were eventually rescued by local villagers amid bombing by the Japanese army and travelled west until they reached Chongqing, then the capital of Nationalist China.
Thomas Macia, 71, had always been curious about the route his father took through China. He began to identify those locations after James died in 2009, at 93. During a three-day trip in late October, Macia saw the hill where his father landed and spent the night, and spoke with people whose parents or grandparents helped move him to safety.
“It was very gratifying to actually see the terrain and the locations and meet people whose ancestors had protected and assisted my father. Without them, I would not be here today,” said Macia in an email interview from the United States.
Before he left Jiangxi, he wrapped some stones in part of the parachute his father used 76 years ago, and brought them back to his home in Arlington, Virginia.
“I wanted to have a piece of China that represented the area where my father was in 1942. It serves as a tangible connection with the location in China of this very historic and important event in his life, and in the memory of my family,” Macia said.
Thomas Macia is a member of Children of Doolittle Raiders, a group of families of the men who took part in the Doolittle Raid. First the men themselves, and now their families, maintained ties with China over the years, even though the Chinese and US governments had their ups and downs in official relations. For the families, the relations formed through the blood and death of their fathers should continue to be nurtured.
The Doolittle Raid involved 80 airmen aboard 16 B-25s, and 75 crash-landed or had to bail out of their planes in Jiangxi, Anhui and Zhejiang provinces, including three who were killed in action and eight captured by the Japanese troops.
Chinese civilians and soldiers helped 64 of the raiders, using stretchers, jampans, doolees, trucks and trains to move the men through war zones to safety within a month.
Over the years, some of the raiders’ children have tried to retrace their steps in China, an act that not only commemorates their fathers’ heroism, but firms their bonds into another generation. Along the way, they lighted the hearts of many Chinese who may not have known the bravery of their own fathers as unsung rescuers.
Last month a museum dedicated to the Doolittle Raid opened in a scenic spot in Quzhou, Zhejiang province. Situated in an ancient courtyard with white walls and dark cornices, the museum featured photographic introductions to each raider and exhibited 200 items from the raid, including wreckage from some of the crashed planes.
Quzhou was home to one of three airstrips the raiders planned to land on, had the operation not started hours earlier and farther from Japan than scheduled because the US Navy had been spotted by Japanese picket boats. The Chinese side was not notified of the change in plans and the airfields, where the planes were supposed to land on April 19 to refuel, were not open the night of April 18.
Short of fuel and with no response from the airfields, the raiders had to bail out or crash-land, not knowing for sure whether the area was controlled by Chinese or Japanese troops. In all, 51 raiders ended up in Quzhou before they were smuggled out to safety.
A delegation of 24 Children of Doolittle Raiders members travelled from the US to take part in the museum’s opening ceremony. Also present was a local historian from Shangrao, who later would inform Thomas Macia about the people involved in his father’s rescue.
Luo Shiping, a history professor from Shangrao, Jiangxi province, saw the photo album Macia brought along and noticed a name card, which read Dr B C Chen and included an address in Shangrao.
Dr B C Chen was on the list James Macia provided to the US government of those who helped rescue him, but the identity of the man had always been unknown to the son.
