
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 21, 1992                   TAG: 9203210064
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KARREN MILLS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RED WING, MINN.                                LENGTH: Medium

AIRMEN OF 1942 BOMBING RAID MEET, THANK CHINESE RESCUERS

Almost 50 years ago, a band of American airmen under Col. Jimmy Doolittle staged a daring bomber attack on Tokyo - and then flew on to China where they put their lives in the hands of peasants and workers.

On Friday, eight of the aging airmen were reunited with five of their Chinese rescuers and got a second chance to say "Thank you."

"We've thought about these people for 50 years," said retired Lt. Col. Frank Kappeler of Santa Rosa, Calif., navigator on one of Doolittle's B-25 bombers.

The Chinese and Americans, now in their 70s and 80s, were brought together by artist and history buff Bryan Moon, from the nearby town of Frontenac. He led a 1990 expedition to China to recover parts of the bombers that made the historic raid and met some of the people who had rescued the Americans.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Moon said. "This was the 50th year. It had to happen now."

Forty-two of the 80 airmen who made the raid are still alive. Doolittle, 95, lives in Pebble Beach, Calif., and was unable to attend, but sent a message to be read to the Chinese at a reception Sunday.

The desperate raid on Japan on April 18, 1942, came just four months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a time when American morale badly needed a boost. It was depicted two years later in the film "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," starring Spencer Tracy as Doolittle.

Doolittle's 16 bombers took off from the USS Hornet, the first fully loaded bombers ever to take off from an aircraft carrier.

After the raid, the Doolittle raiders were to fly on west to land at airfields in China that were in friendly hands. But an early takeoff, coupled with strong headwinds, depleted their gasoline reserves and almost all had to abandon their planes and bail out.

Of the 80 airmen, three drowned or were killed when they parachuted, according to Carroll V. Glines, who helped Doolittle write his autobiography. Eight landed in Japanese-held China and were imprisoned, three later to be executed as war criminals and a fourth to die in prison.

But Doolittle and 68 others came down in free China or the Soviet Far East and eventually made their way back to U.S. forces, some with the help of people

like Zhao Xiaobao, a fisherman's wife. She attended the reunion and recalled how one of Doolittle's bombers crashed near her home on the coastal island of Tan Toushan.

"That night, I saw an airplane flying low in the sky, and then there was a tremendous noise," said Zhao, who helped hide and rescue Maj. Griffith Williams, a co-pilot, his engineer-gunner, Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, and two others.

"We fled to the mountains. When we came home, we found four airmen hidden in the pigpen of our home," she said through an interpreter.

"They probably saved our lives," said Williams, now of El Cajon, Calif. "The Japanese were within two miles. [The Chinese] kept us under cover."

by CNB