The friendship of life and death to rescue the pilots of the Doolittle Bombing Wing
April 18, 1942, the U.S. Doolittle Bombing Wing flew to China's Zhejiang Province after an air attack on Japan's Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe and other cities, due to a variety of reasons, the crews lost contact with the ground, and were unable to land on the scheduled plan in the airport of Quzhou, 15 planes crashed one after the other, or forced to land in China's Zhejiang Province, Anhui Province, Jiangxi. The vast majority of the American pilots were rescued by the Chinese military and civilians and were successfully rescued.
Since the area where the U.S. planes were forced to land was the intersection of the Japanese and Chinese army fronts, it was risky to rescue them, but the Chinese military and civilians still gave these U.S. pilots selfless help, providing the best food and lodging they could and treating the wounded under very difficult conditions, so they were able to arrive safely at the rear and return to the front line of the anti-fascist war. On the night of April 18, Zhao Xiaobao and her husband Ma Liangshui, residents of Tangtou Island in Xiangshan County, found four American pilots (the crew of the Fifteenth Airplane) huddled in their pigsty. Ma Liangshui hurriedly invited the pilots into the house, while Zhao Xiaobao was busy making a fire and cooking for them. The next day, the other pilot of the crew was also found. At that time, Xiangshan was under Japanese occupation and there were Japanese patrol boats everywhere. Ma Liangshui and other villagers dressed up the pilots as Chinese fishermen, avoided the Japanese blockade, and escorted them to a safe place with a small sampan. When they parted, the five pilots clasped Ma Liangshui's hand and refused to part, expressing their gratitude despite the language barrier.
The pilot on the third plane, Ozark, fell into the mountains of Jiangshan after parachuting and was found by the local people and escorted out of the mountains after being maintained by Liao Shiyuan and others. On the steep mountain road, Liao Shiyuan and other and help and back, walking for a whole day, finally escorted Ozark to the destination.
Four of the five crew members were seriously injured after the No. 7 crashed in the rocky reef area of Dasha Village in Sanmen Bay. Fishermen who heard the crash rescued them from the shore and urgently escorted them to the Sanmen County Health Center for resuscitation. Due to the poorly equipped health center, the director rushed to Linhai County Enze Hospital, which has the best medical equipment and conditions within a hundred miles, for help. Under the arrangement of Chen Shenqi, the director of Enze Hospital, his eldest son, Dr. Chen Shenyan, and his wife, Nurse Zhang Xuexiang, immediately boarded a sedan chair and hurriedly traveled for 8 hours to pull the 5 pilots back from Sanmen County Health Hospital, 40 kilometers away. However, Lt. Ted Lawson's leg injury was deteriorating, and the U.S. military doctor accompanying the unit had to amputate Lawson's leg with the help of Chen Shenyan. In order to ensure the safety of the American wounded, the Zhejiang Provincial Government arranged for Dr. Chen Shenyan to escort them to the rear. Along the way they had utilized various means of transportation, from stretcher, sedan chair to car, rolling from Xianju to Quzhou via Jinhua, and then back to China via Hengyang, Guilin and Kunming. At Kunming Airport, the crew expressed their deep gratitude to Chen Shenyan who escorted them all the way. After Lawson returned to China, he wrote "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" based on his own experience, in which he made a detailed statement about the kindness of the Chinese people at great length.