Man recalls role in WWII raid
GULF BREEZE, Fla. – An art-filled home on a quiet residential street nestled between the East Bay and Santa Rosa Sound hardly seems like a place where wartime atrocities would be a topic of conversation.
Yet that’s just what happened on a recent afternoon as 90-year-old Pax Cheng recounted his experiences growing up in China during the Sino-japanese War, which would later merge into a theater of World War II as horrific Japanese incursions into China continued.
As part of those years spanning the late 1930s and early 1940s, Cheng, as an 11-year-old boy studying at a boarding school in Shanghai, played a supporting role in the story of the Doolittle Raiders – at risk of serious Japanese reprisal.
The World War II exploit by 80 volunteer airmen from the U.S. Army Air Forces is well-remembered and honored across Northwest Florida, inasmuch as the Raiders, under the leadership of Lt. Col. James Doolittle, spent three weeks training for their mission at what was then Eglin Field, part of modern-day Eglin Air Force Base.
The Doolittle Raiders, loaded in fiveman crews aboard 16 B-25 bombers, launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet in the Pacific Ocean on April 18, 1942 – the first time that bombers had taken off from an aircraft carrier – and hit military and industrial targets in Japan.
The damage caused by the raid was relatively slight, but it proved that Japan was not beyond the reach of American air power, and provided a morale boost to U.S. military personnel and the American people just four months after Japan’s devastating sneak air attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
But because the Doolittle Raiders had to leave the USS Hornet early after the carrier was spotted by a Japanese patrol boat, they wouldn’t have enough fuel to make it to friendly airfields in China as planned.
And that’s where 11-year-old Pax Cheng’s part in the story begins. Cheng was part of a politically connected family, and despite his youth, Chinese adults working to thwart Japanese intentions in China knew he could be trusted, Marcia Moritz, a longtime companion of Cheng, said during a recent interview.
Knowing that the Doolittle Raiders would need assistance as they bailed out of their fuel-starved planes over China or tried to land them, the Chinese began a surreptitious effort to ensure there would be people nearby to help the downed airmen as they worked to make it to their ultimate destination of Chongqing, then the seat of the Chinese Nationalist government.
“A guy in a blue coat – I didn’t know who he was – came to the school and whispered to me a message, and I was to pass on this message to a woman (who would identify herself to me) as Ouija Board,” Cheng recalled.
All these years later, Cheng can’t recall what the coded message was, except to remember that it was just part of a message that would ultimately make its way, in full, to the people charged with ensuring the Doolittle Raiders would get a friendly and helpful welcome.
“It was a very brief message,” he said. “I didn’t understand what it was. It was kind of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell, pass the information on.’ ”
“Everything was done in secret codes because we didn’t want the Japanese to catch on,” Cheng explained.
A short time later, Cheng found himself living out the intent of the message as he waited with other people – lying in concealment in the grass on the outskirts of Shanghai – for what he would later learn was the anticipated arrival of the Doolittle Raiders.
“Hundreds of people” stretched from the outskirts of Shanghai to the Russian border more than 1,000 miles away, “were ready for the Doolittle rescue,” he said.