In the Time of the Locusts

An untold story of the aftermath of Doolittle's Tokyo raid in 1942. When the U.S. responded to Pearl Harbor attack with a surprise bombing of Tokyo, many Chinese people saved the pilot lives and paid with their own lives in South China, and the Japanese Imperial Army took out its fury on the Chinese civilian people. That generosity shown by the Chinese would trigger a horrific retaliation by the Japanese that claimed an estimated quarter-million Chinese soldiers and civilians killed in the three-month campaign after they saved 64 airmen of the 15 bombers with 75 airmen crash landing in my hometown in Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces in South China, which was more than 25 times the Allied forces' casualties (9,758) on D-Day, and would prompt comparisons to the 1937-38 Rape of Nanking. Long-forgotten missionary records discovered in the archives of DePaul University for the first time shed important new light on the extent to which the Chinese suffered in the aftermath of the Doolittle raid. The trying times of the episode of history and life and death forged life-long admiration and friendships between Americans and the people of China.