Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange, at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE house, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision in global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE and indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome, inside the ICE house. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
One of the things that get you through a pandemic like an old friend, is a well produced podcast to pass the time while you're doing dishes or walking the dog. And just in the nick of time comes season five of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, a tent pole product of Pushkin Industries, one of the last original podcast production startups that hasn't been bought yet by Spotify. That's NYSE ticker symbol SPOT. In the current season, Gladwell's in the midst of a four part story arc on Army Air Force General Curtis Emerson LeMay, founder of the so-called Bomber Mafia, the pilots who believed to their bone, that wars could be won in the air alone. To back up their belief, they developed ever more powerful aircraft and ever more destructive ordinance to do just that. The plane that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, 75 years ago, this summer was the B-29 Super Fortress.
Josh King:
Made by Boeing, it weighed about 100,000 pounds, could fly at 32,000 feet, and cruise along at 365 miles an hour with a range of 5830 miles. The program to build the B-29, which is part of Gladwell's story this season, cost about $3 billion. That's 43 billion in today's dollars, which far exceeded the $1.9 billion cost of the Manhattan Project, and was the most expensive project of the war.
Josh King:
Six days after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan surrendered to the United States effectively ending World War II. Now, rewind the clock a more than three years from that moment, to April 18th, 1942. It was just four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and America desperately needed to punch back and go on the offensive. FDR wanted to take the war to the Japanese mainland. And on that day, another air raid was conducted over Japan, this time with a squadron of 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers.
Josh King:
The B-25 was a much smaller plane than the B-29, 53 feet long. It weighed about 20,000 pounds, a fifth of the size of the B-29, and had a range of about 3000 miles. Made by North American Aviation, which carries on today as Rockwell Automation, that's NYSE ticker symbol ROK, the manufacturer produced nearly 10,000 B-25s, in various models. The last of which finally retired from service in 1979, as part of Indonesia's Air Force.
Josh King:
Now, of those 10,000 B-25s, the 16 aircraft that were part of Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo were the most legendary. The US didn't have a forward base to launch its planes against the enemy, they'd have to launch from an aircraft carrier. And the bombers, you see, wouldn't have enough fuel to discharge their ordinance and return somewhere safe. They'd have to ditch or find an airfield. It was a suicide mission, many thought.
Josh King:
The story of the pilots and crew members of that mission, and what happened to them after their heroics were reported back to American audiences and news reels, myth and legend, is chronicled in Last Mission to Tokyo, the Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice. It's just out from Simon and Schuster, and we'll talk with its author, Michel Paradis, right after this.
Speaker 3:
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Josh King:
Michel Paradis, one of America's leading lawyers in the area of international law and human rights has won high profile cases around the globe, and worked for over a decade with the US Department of Defense, where he's led many of the landmark court cases to arise out of Guantanamo Bay.
Josh King:
He's a lecturer at Columbia Law School, where he teaches on the military, the constitution and the law of war. In addition to Last Mission to Tokyo, the Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and their Final Fight for Justice, he also writes for The Atlantic from time to time, where a piece he wrote last month, The Lost Cause's Long Legacy. Why Does the US Army Name its Bases After Generals it Defeated, also caught my eye. We'll get into that, too, during these extraordinary times. Michel Paradis, welcome inside the ICE house.
Michel Paradis:
Thank you so much for having me.
Josh King:
This may not have been the way you expected to carry out a book tour. How's it going?
Michel Paradis:
It's going great so far. It's actually in some ways a lot better. I can do it from the comfort of my office, as opposed to having to schlep all over the place, so it's been nice. So thank you very much. This is a real pleasure.
Josh King:
You're in Manhattan still, or you escaped the city?
Michel Paradis:
No, we're in Manhattan still. My wife is a ICU pulmonologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital, so she was the front line of the front line of the COVID pandemic when it took over the city, so we've been in the thick of it.
Josh King:
How's it going?
Michel Paradis:
It's going a lot better. There were a couple very scary months, as anyone in New York can attest, where all of Manhattan looked like a ghost town, but now things are coming back to life. The streets are beginning to bustle. Restaurants have all gone al fresco, which is actually kind of a delightful opportunity, to come from this crisis. And so things are getting better. People are more optimistic, and yeah, things are looking up. Hoping it stays that way through the fall.
Josh King:
Michel, you're a Fordham kid, but you must have been wicked smart because you also have a PhD from Oxford in Computational Linguistics. But take me back even further, as a young boy indoctrinated into the legends of World War II, like we all were, how did you first learn about the Doolittle Raid?
Michel Paradis:
Oh, I first learned about the Doolittle Raid, certainly as a child, just going to air shows, when they would bring around the B-25s, and you'd see these, what, to me, as a kid growing up in the '80s, looked like these antiquated propeller planes, compared to the ones I really wanted to see like the F-14 Tomcat, out of Top Gun. But that's when I first learned the story, because you'd always hear the story, "This is the plane that turned the tide of war against Japan."
Michel Paradis:
And then I remember seeing it for the first time on the film, as you probably all remember, in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, where the Doolittle raid provides the sort of climactic denouement of the Doolittle raid, so yeah, it's something that's been with me, certainly my entire life. It's one of the great American stories, and obviously one of the great World War II stories.
Josh King:
So Michel, this is a journey of sorts for you. You graduate from Fordham Law in 2004, and by 2007, you're at the Department of Defense. This is about the same time that Senator Barack Obama is out on the campaign trail saying things like, and I'm going to quote, "In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib, and the detention cells of Guantanamo, we have compromised our most precious values," he said.
Josh King:
At the time, you're working indirectly for Vice President, Dick Chaney, who said of those at Gitmo, and I'm going to quote him too, "They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want. There isn't another nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people." Is there some truth in both of those statements?
Michel Paradis:
Good question. I would say there is a lot of truth. There's a lot of truth in both statements, but that doesn't mean the answer is everything's fine, we should keep on moving. Certainly by 2007, Guantanamo was no longer the place it was in 2002, 2003, where it really earned its reputation as one of the world's most notorious dungeons. By 2007, the Supreme Court had ruled that the Geneva Conventions apply in Guantanamo. By 2007, George W. Bush himself said, "We need to close Guantanamo." So by 2007, when those remarks were made, certainly it is true that Guantanamo was a far less damaging place to America's reputation, at least in terms of what was being done there than in its earlier iterations.
Michel Paradis:
However, the damage to its reputation had largely been done by that point and its continuing existence well into the Obama administration certainly harmed the United States in incalculable ways.
Michel Paradis:
I remember around that same exact time, Colin Powell was interviewed on Meet the Press, and he said, "If I was advising the President, I'd advise him to close Guantanamo, not tomorrow, but this afternoon." And even though that was what, you're talking about 12, 13 years now, that sentiment remains true today. Guantanamo has cost the United States enormous sums of money given what it's there to do. There are 40 prisoners there now, at a cost of approximately $12 million each, per year.
Michel Paradis:
But I think the costs diplomatically, the costs morally, the costs to our ability to operate on the battlefield with the moral authority and with the admiration and support, not only of our allies, but the basic admiration of our adversaries, is something that Guantanamo has genuinely cost us. It's made our wars far more dangerous, and frankly also far less successful.
Josh King:
So Michel, this leads you, in total, on this indirect path to Jimmy Doolittle. Let's work on the parallel path here, yours and that of Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle. First, tell us about the man with a doctorate in aeronautics from MIT, and the mission he volunteered to lead that was cooked up by Hap Arnold, with the whackadoodle idea to launch 16 B-25s from the deck of the USS Hornet, to hit targets in Tokyo, Kobe, Yokohama, Osaka and Nagoya.
Michel Paradis:
Yeah, Jimmy Doolittle is one of the great American stories, all by himself. The Doolittle raid just being the marquee moment of an otherwise extraordinary life. He grows up as a boy in rural Alaska, until he moves to Southern California. And like I was when I was a boy, went to an air show, but this was an air show at the turn of the century, and immediately fell in love with this brute loud machine, through which a man was flying through the air.
Michel Paradis:
To think about what it must have been like to see the first airplanes, men flying in the first airplanes, it gives you chills to think of what a revolutionary moment that was. And so Doolittle falls in love with aviation, enlists in the Army Air Corps during World War I. Thankfully, sees no action because had he, he would've had a one in three chance of being killed in action, and a one in three chance of being killed in a plane accident.
Michel Paradis:
So thankfully, avoids action in World War I, and then goes on, in the 1920s, both to get his degree, his PhD from MIT in aeronautical engineering, as you said, but also to become one of the most famous stunt pilots in America. He's the first American to cross the United States within 24 hours. And again, what a revolutionary thing to do. It's easy for us to imagine. We get frustrated on a three, or four, or five hour flight across the United States.
Michel Paradis:
Jimmy Doolittle made San Francisco as close to New York as Philadelphia was, and that was just an extraordinary moment, an extraordinary galvanizing moment of American optimism. So he goes on, lives this life as a celebrity stunt pilot, works for Shell Oil, ticker symbol RDS, if I'm remembering correctly, and then leaves this incredibly lucrative job at Shell to join the Army Air Forces in 1941.
Michel Paradis:
The war clouds are forming, he wants to serve his country, and so he reenters the Army Air Forces as a Lieutenant Colonel. And as you said, gets tapped by Hap Arnold to do this incredible mission.
Josh King:
Tell us about some of the logistics in terms of retrofitting these B-25s to make this flight. The tail guns were replaced by broomsticks to lighten the load.
Michel Paradis:
Oh, and not just that. Only Jimmy Doolittle could have pulled this mission off, because when Hap Arnold asked him, "Is there any way to launch a bombing raid on Japan in 1942?" The answer was no. There was no technological capability in the US arsenal or anyone else's arsenal, to be able to do it.
Michel Paradis:
And so he engineered around the problem. He used his combination of just a fly boy's grit and fearlessness, with his doctorate from MIT to completely reconfigure the B-25, to make this mission even remotely possible. His time in Shell Oil really gave him the ability to know the aviation industry, and so he was able to contract with Mid-Atlantic Aviation to retrofit and completely modify the B-25, to basically turn it into a flying gas can with a couple of bombs attached. Every piece of equipment, every bit of safety equipment, radio equipment, you name it, was ripped out in order to save weight. And that space he refilled with gas cans.
Michel Paradis:
It got to the point where the planes themselves were actually quite hazardous, because they had very few defenses. And so, as you said, they ended up painting a couple broomsticks black and bolting them onto the tail to make it look like there were guns there. The engineers even painted black lines to make it look like the quote unquote guns were mounted in the turret. And so it was, just this combination of ingenuity, of improvisation, and just a determination to make these planes pull this mission off.
Michel Paradis:
And honestly, I don't think anyone other than Jimmy Doolittle could have done it because his whole shtick was to always make the numbers add up. He would do these things that made him look insane. In the late 1920s, he actually wanted to prove that using flight instruments was a better way of flying a plane than using the gut, using your sense, because being inside a cockpit can be very disorienting. And so what he did was, he blacked out the window out of his airplane, took off, flew 14 miles around Long Island, and landed without ever being able to see a few feet in front of him. And people thought he was just a lunatic, right?
Michel Paradis:
But he knew what he was doing, he had calculated his way out of every risk. And that's exactly what he did with the Doolittle Raid.
Josh King:
Okay Michel, it's now 65 years later, and young Defense Department lawyer Paradis is hearing this rumor that there's a post World War II war crimes trial, where Japanese soldiers were supposedly prosecuted for water boarding. So you dispatch a young Marine Captain to the National Archives to look this up. What did he find?
Michel Paradis:
Well, she came back with the record, which was this old sort of tattered trial record, which I don't think anyone had looked at in 65 years. And I started reading it, because again, this is the end of the Bush administration, there was still a big controversy, is waterboarding torture? And not only was waterboarding treated as obvious torture, it was the central accusation against some Japanese war criminals who were prosecuted for essentially torturing the Doolittle Raiders who were captured.
Michel Paradis:
There were a number of other parallels that really just deeply disturbed me, as I read more and more. The use of ex post facto laws. Not only the use of torture, but the use of evidence in a court proceeding that was tainted by torture, the enactment, or the use of a war crimes law that treated enemy nationals differently than they treated American nationals, so that only non-Japanese could be tried by these military tribunals, essentially violating the golden rule.
Michel Paradis:
And I read one thing after another, this prosecution of the Japanese for doing all of these things, and it hit me in the chest because I realized all the things we had not only accused the Japanese of doing, but prosecuted them for as war criminals, were things that we were doing still in Guantanamo.
Michel Paradis:
And that's when I realized this story, even though it's been long forgotten, is something that Americans really just need to know about, because it's a time in our history where values really mattered. And essentially, we win the war and we win the peace after the war by advancing American values, even when it requires us to temper our desire for revenge.
Josh King:
We're going to get to winning the peace in a few minutes, but first back to General Arnold's mission, for which Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle had to round up volunteers. Tell me about some of them. Let's start with Chase Jay Nielsen, 22 year old flying cadet, who found himself at Eglin Field, near Pensacola.
Michel Paradis:
Yeah. Chase J Nielsen is a fascinating, fascinating character, such an amazing person. He's a Mormon who grows up in a small town in Utah, gets married in December of 1941. He and his fiance had been actually planning to get married on, I think, December 7th or December 8th, 1941, and the Japanese intervened to ruin their wedding day. But nevertheless, they elope, and Nielsen is flooding with the 17th bombardment group, at the time stationed in Oregon, but then gets a request. The whole 17th bombardment group gets this request, volunteers for a dangerous mission. And young men of a certain age can't turn something like that down.
Michel Paradis:
And Nielsen was one of them, even though he was a married man. I think it was very difficult for him to certainly leave his new wife, but nevertheless, he did it, because it was also his duty. He understood that. He wasn't going to bow out just because he had a family, all sorts of Americans had families. And so, he ends up on the sixth plane off of the deck of the USS Hornet, flies as the navigator over Japan, navigates almost pin perfect positioning so that they hit all of their targets, all of their industrial targets in downtown Tokyo, and then navigates them to the coast of China, where they're hoping to get to an airfield that Chiang Kai-shek has supposedly set up.
Michel Paradis:
But they all can tell they're about to run out of gas. And so the pilot of the plane, a guy named Dean Hallmark, basically tells everyone, "We got to ditch." And so they slowly, slowly, slowly attempt to run the plane across the bottom, across waves to do a water landing. But then the engines kick out just at the last minute, and it forces the plane to tip.
Michel Paradis:
And when the plane tips, its wing catches the waves, whips the plane onto its side, smashes the glass nose of the plane into the water. They're going 150 miles an hour, probably, so that's like hitting concrete. Nielsen gets knocked momentarily, unconscious, and then wakes up inside the cockpit of the plane that's about to fill entirely with water. He's about to drown, and he pulls himself out.
Michel Paradis:
Two of his brothers in the plane have been severely injured, they don't make it, but he, the pilot and the co-pilot are able to swim to shore in the dead of night, in the middle of a rainstorm. And they think they're safe, or they hope they're safe. The next day, they wake up in a seaside village on the coast of China that's just a few hundred miles south of Shanghai. And everything seems to be fine until some Chinese guerillas come around, who are allied with the Japanese, it turns out. And he gets turned over and becomes one of the first aviators who have been taken prisoner by the Japanese. And his saga really then goes from there.
Josh King:
When these Japanese regulars who are with the guerillas grab the survivors, you write that an interpreter told them, "You now Japanese prisoners. You no worry, we treat you fine." Did they?
Michel Paradis:
No. Very quickly, Nielsen, Hallmark and Robert Mader are all taken up to Shanghai and taken into the custody of Japan's intelligence service, the Kenpeitai, kind of secret police. And they spend an afternoon being brutally tortured. Nielsen is put into stress positions where they put a bamboo pole behind his knees and force him back onto the ground and then stomp on his thighs to essentially pull apart the ligaments in his knees.
Michel Paradis:
They jam thin sticks like that are like pencils in between his fingers to drive them down into the, into the nerves. They kick him repeatedly, brutally in the shin so that he has scars, really for the rest of his life, across his shins. At least to him and some of the other people, they use the infamous waterboard, which is a suffocation, essentially a drowning technique where they lay you on your back, they put a towel over your face and they pour water on until the water begins to fill your lungs, and you literally begin to drown.
Michel Paradis:
Sometimes waterboarding is called simulated drowning. It's just drowning. It's just more of a controlled drowning, I think, is the only caveat you can put onto it. So they brutally torture him, and try and get him to confess to atrocities. Shortly thereafter, they take him to another dungeon, him and the rest of the crew of the Green Hornet, to another dungeon in a secret location in Tokyo, which I discovered is actually Kenpeitai headquarters in Tokyo, through my research.
Michel Paradis:
And there they find out that five other Doolittle Raiders had been captured from the 16th plane, called the Bat Out of Hell, and they had also suffered brutal tortures. And in the course of being interrogated by the Japanese intelligence service, the Kenpeitai, in Tokyo they're essentially held in solitary confinement day and night. They're questioned constantly. The brutality of the torture begins to recede, they're not being physically tortured in the same way, but the mental torture is far worse.
Michel Paradis:
They're subject to extended sleep deprivation, they're kept in solitary confinement. Many of them ultimately kind of go mad. Solitary confinement is probably one of the most brutal forms of torture. John McCain writes about that in his book, which I highly recommend, Faith of my Fathers, and he talked about how solitary confinement is probably the worst form torture he suffered, because it pits your mind against itself as you're wiled away. And so, he and the eight other surviving Doolittle Raiders who are captured by the Japanese, basically are subjected to all sorts of brutality, and manipulation, and torture, in an effort to get them to both disclose the details of their mission, but also to confess to atrocities against the Japanese.
Josh King:
If you can put yourself momentarily in the shoes of a Japanese prosecutor, looking at the survivors of the Green Hornet and the Bat Out of Hell, in the courtroom, the interpreter read the charges and the charges were bombing and strafing school areas, you have been sentenced to death. If you're a Japanese prosecutor, according to Japanese law, how rock solid was that case?
Michel Paradis:
Well, if you're a Japanese prosecutor under Japanese law, it was a completely rock solid case. You had confessions, right? The old Soviet line is that the confession is the queen of all evidence. That's because once someone confesses, it's easy to believe almost anything about them, all the evidence will fit that confession. And that's ultimately what torture is good at. Torture is not effective. Any expert in interrogation will tell you, torture is a very ineffective way of getting information. New information. Because, if nothing else, you have no way of really verifying that information in real time.
Michel Paradis:
But if you want confirmation, if you just need to hear it from the horse's mouth, well then by golly, beat the horse, because eventually everyone will tell you what you want to hear, and that's what the Kenpeitai did. They got all the Doolittle Raiders to confess to committing atrocities against the Japanese. They had the Doolittle Raiders sign the confessions to make it look more formal. And then, when the Japanese decide to put the Doolittle Raiders on trial as war criminals, they enact an ex post facto law in order to try the Doolittle Raiders for alleged war crimes, atrocities against Japanese civilians.
Michel Paradis:
What's the queen of the evidence? The confessions signed by the Doolittle Raiders and the fact that they came from the Kenpeitai certainly put everyone on notice that these confessions may not have been voluntary. But the lawyers, the judges, they looked the other way because that was what a good bureaucrat would do. And so, they felt they had a rock solid case. They pushed their rock solid case, and they won their case. They got a death sentence against all eight Doolittle Raiders.
Josh King:
We've had several former Navy SEALs on this show, Michel, Ray Nichols, who's a former Wisconsin National Guardsman turned Commando for the Office of Strategic Services, seems in your account to be their equal. Tell us about Operation Magpie.
Michel Paradis:
Yeah, this is one of the best untold stories that I was really able to unearth. So Operation Magpie is one of a few operations that the Office of Strategic Services does in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki, and then the armistice with the Japanese on August 15th. And what they do is they send these tiny little commando teams, like half a dozen men, to all the various prison camps that the Japanese are running, all over China.
Michel Paradis:
And Operation Magpie is the operation to liberate the prisoners and to investigate potential war crimes in the Fengtai prison camp, which is just outside of Beijing. And so Ray Nichols, who is often described as the most humorless man in the Army, in World War II, leads this mission. They airdrop right outside of the Fengtai prison camp, where about 500 prisoners of war are being held by the Japanese. They begin to approach the prison camp and they're sort of walking slowly through the tall grass. All of a sudden pops go off, and the Japanese start shooting at them because they're obviously Americans trying to come at the camp.
Michel Paradis:
And so, they hit the dirt, but a wiser Lieutenant comes out and basically picks them up, brings them back to Fengtai, doesn't take away their guns so everyone's a little suspicious and unsure what's going on. And they learn that most of the Japanese Army does not know the war is over. And had they attempted this mission even a few hours later, when it was dark, there's no question they would've all been killed immediately. But what Ray Nichols does, he negotiates with the Japanese General in charge of Fengtai to secure the release of all of these prisoners of war.
Michel Paradis:
And he does, it's incredible. He gets all of these prisoners of war not only released, but put it up in Beijing's poshest hotel, the Grand Hotel, which was a converted geisha house. And so in the week after the war is over, this hotel becomes just this frat house of liberated prisoners of war, celebrating victory, looting the sake, and just, literally drunk, not only on the sake, but also on the fact that they were both victorious and had finally gotten their freedom back.
Michel Paradis:
But they hear a rumor. They hear a rumor that their Doolittle Raiders were also being held in Fengtai, but none of the guys in the Grand Hotel are the Doolittle Raiders. And so Ray Nichols goes back and confronts the warden in the most colorful possible terms, says, "I know you saw the Doolittle Raiders here, last week."
Michel Paradis:
And soon enough, he says, "Yes, we have some other prisoners." And the Doolittle Raiders were being held in a separate solitary confinement section of the prison. And very quickly the warden gets them all shaved, quite quickly and brusquely, and puts them in fresh uniforms, which billow over them because they're two sizes too large, because the Doolittle Raiders have lost so much weight in prison.
Michel Paradis:
And four of the Doolittle Raiders come out and meet Ray Nichols, and Nichols looks at one of them, Chase Nielsen, and he introduces himself. And Chase Nielsen says, "I'm Chase Nielsen. I was a Doolittle Raider," and Nichols sort of smiles, probably broader than he ever has, and said, "Got to watch out for this guy. I think he's lost his marbles."
Josh King:
So during the time that Nielsen had been imprisoned, his cohort had become championed everywhere. I mean, not since Kublai Khan was the last invader of the Japanese mainland had a hostile actor, penetrated Imperial soil. What was life like for Nielsen as a living legend? FDR had spun a tale that they came from our new base at Shangri-La I mean, this is a hero who isn't used to the spotlight, and has been out of the spotlight for such a long time.
Michel Paradis:
Yeah. He literally becomes a legend. Everyone assumes back in the United States, that he's dead. After the show trial in 1942, the Japanese army announces that the Doolittle Raiders had been severely punished and executed. What was less clear, and what was not disclosed was the fact that the Emperor had actually commuted the sentences of five of the Doolittle Raiders, only three were actually executed.
Michel Paradis:
And so everyone back in Utah believes that Nielsen is dead. They name a B-25 after him, his name is included on the annual honor roles for those who've been lost in World War II. He is Lazarus. And then, at the end of August 1945, he comes back from the dead. And he's bleary-eyed, he's extremely malnourished, but he, honestly more than any of the other Doolittle Raiders, has done the best at keeping his mind together.
Michel Paradis:
He's a brilliant guy, has a real head for numbers, and just does all the right things in captivity to try and keep himself sane. And so he essentially comes back from the dead to this world in which he is one of the most celebrated heroes of World War II. There's already been a movie made about him, and he has a complicated time. On the one hand, it's the warmest possible welcome someone like him could possibly have hoped for. But on the other hand, when you spend so much time in solitary confinement, your mind begins to fade, you get tense, you get paranoid. It's well documented in the psychological literature.
Michel Paradis:
And so, he goes from having no one to talk to, to his voice literally getting hoarse because so many people want to talk to him and hear his story. One of the things that was probably the most rewarding in writing the book, was trying to write about his process of recovery, and how ultimately the justice system plays an important role in his ability to recover himself, his sense of self, his sense of place in the world.
Josh King:
Talk to me about this writing experience for you. I mean, as you and I are talking, you don't sound like a by the books lawyer, you said you had to learn how to write less like a lawyer and more like a human being, and that brought a host of challenges for you.
Michel Paradis:
Thank you. I will take that as a high compliment. Yeah, it was a really challenging process. I think the hardest part for me was not the research, was not even the trying to make sense of what was going on in Japan in the 1940s. That was really challenging, don't get me wrong. But I had some great Japanese research assistants, who really were able to help me work through a lot of the documents. The hardest part for me was learning to, as you said, write like a human being. And for me, the lesson that I learned from my really brilliant editor at Simon, Julianna Haubner, was to always remember you're writing about people and write the story of people. If you want to sound like a person, you need to write about people.
Michel Paradis:
And that was a really important mental shift that I had to go through, in terms of making this story something that anyone but a lawyer would want to read. And I'll let the results speak for themselves. But it really also made the whole project a lot more fun, because it was the opportunity to really learn a kind of storytelling, and to really learn about how to really get into the head of the person you're writing about. It's non-fiction, but it basically required me to learn a lot of the techniques that novelists use to make a story compelling.
Josh King:
Novelists, yes. But dude, by my count, 95 pages of end notes, I guess they couldn't squeeze all of the lawyer out of you.
Michel Paradis:
No, they could not. I insisted on having all those end notes. So everything you read, even the stuff that is totally bonkers and you can't believe it's true is not only 100% true, it's fully documented. So you can look up the documents yourself.
Josh King:
When we come back, after the break, we get into the ensuing legal drama with Michel Paradis, author of Last Mission to Tokyo, the Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice. That's right after this.
Speaker 3:
In our time of greatest need, we want to thank the true heroes around the world for stepping up, for taking care of us, and keeping us safe with your expertise, your commitment, your sacrifice, and your selflessness, we'll work together to create a brighter future. And we thank you for reminding us what really matters. From all of us. Thank you.
Josh King:
Back now with Michel Paradis, author of Last Mission to Tokyo, the Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice.
Josh King:
Before the break we were talking about Jimmy Doolittle's legendary raid, and the plight of some of the crewmen who didn't return from the mission. Michel, you're an esteemed lawyer, like many esteemed lawyers, you write scholarly tracts on obscure cases like US v Iwata et al. You look at your legal pad and you try to divine the lessons that a case like that has for international and national security law. What lessons do you think you'd find? And how did it go from something you might find in, let's say Columbia Law Journal, to a narrative nonfiction legal thriller from Simon and Schuster?
Michel Paradis:
Sure. So, the lessons are huge, and it was a real shock to me that this is not a case that was either well known, even within the international legal community, and had really never been written about, other than a few very offhand references, which is how we discovered it in the first place, as a case about waterboarding. The lessons are major. The biggest lesson is that it is the backstory to a really important part of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which is called Common Article Three.
Michel Paradis:
And what Common Article Three does, is say that no matter what someone's status is, no matter who they are, they're entitled to certain basic rights in warfare, including the right not to be tortured, including the right not to be murdered. And including, if they're going to be tried for a war crime, an entitlement to what's called a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees recognized as indispensable by civilized people.
Michel Paradis:
And there's a direct line from the Doolittle trial, which I write about, to this part of the Geneva Conventions. It's one of the most important and studied parts of the Geneva Conventions, and it struck me as just unbelievable, this backstory to how that got into the Geneva Conventions. Why was that something people were concerned about in the late 1940s? How that actually ultimately gets in there.
Michel Paradis:
So, from a purely legal standpoint, it couldn't be more significant. And I'll give you one example, is in 2006, the Supreme Court actually strikes down a number of the Bush administration's policies in Guantanamo. And what is the legal basis on which they strike down these policies? Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions, and the regularly constituted court provisions. So, in my experience, in working on those cases and international humanitarian law cases, and war crimes cases, more generally Common Article Three and that provision of regularly constituted court is something I had always encountered and was important, whether or not I was doing a case in Africa, or in Guantanamo.
Michel Paradis:
And here it was, here was this hidden history behind it, why it mattered, why it was there. So as a pure legal scholar, it was so important, and I was like, "This just has to be written." How it turned into a book of narrative nonfiction, for me, it was really when I started just reading more and more about the people involved, and the characters.
Michel Paradis:
I talked a bit about Chase Nielsen before, and he's so relatable, so remarkable. Jimmy Doolittle, so remarkable. Someone who really just is a character, who's not only a character who should be in a movie, he's been in many movies, and he's often gotten cast by very handsome leading men, which is very generous to him, such as Alec Baldwin and Humphrey Bogart.
Michel Paradis:
So you know them, but also the lawyers, and the one lawyer, the prosecutor in the Doolittle case is a guy named Robert Dwyer. He is the scion of a politician in Rochester, New York. He's a big fish in a small pond his entire life, goes to Harvard Law School, bigger and better things are expected of him. He is unfortunately a Republican, and so loses his first race for office. It's Rochester. Well, it's Rochester in the height of the New Deal, and so, he's on the wrong side of a wave election that goes in favor of FDR. But he builds a respectable law practice in Rochester. And when the war starts, he's nearing 40 years old. But he gets drafted as many, many of the men who serve in World War II ultimately were. Initially, he gets a very boring job as a weather observer, but gets himself into the JAG Corps, the military legal corps, and becomes a professor at the new JAG school and gets deployed to China where again, the work is not particularly interesting.
Michel Paradis:
It's pretty basic court martials of people who go AWOL and that kind of stuff. But in October or November of 1945, his boss asks him to take a look at a new case that might be coming down. And it's the case of the Doolittle Raiders. After Chase Nielsen and three other do little Raiders are liberated in August of 1945, they get interviewed by the chief lawyer in China, a guy named Colonel Edward Ham Young, who wants to conduct war crimes trials in China. And he immediately sees the value of prosecuting whoever in Japan is responsible for what was done to the Doolittle Raiders.
Michel Paradis:
Who that person is, what they did, how they did it is completely unknown at that point. And so Dwyer basically gets this file, he gets some victims and he's basically told, "Build a case to get justice for these victims."
Josh King:
Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Bodine, he's a friend of Dwyer's, with the unappealing prospect of playing defender of the Japanese, the hapless Washington Generals to the Harlem Globe Trotters, the potted plant, like Robert Servatius for Adolph Eichmann, or Otto Stahmer for Hermann Goring. For goodness sake, Bodine had failed out of law school and wasn't even a lawyer. Where did they get this guy?
Michel Paradis:
Yeah. He is a decorated liaison pilot in China. He has a silver star on his chest, and he's terribly bored. He's still stationed in China in the months after the war. He's terribly bored, he's just basically flying VIPs around to various, basically vacation spots in China. And he falls in love with this young woman who is the concierge at a hotel that's turned into the officers' barracks in Shanghai.
Michel Paradis:
The hotel is still there, actually. I got a chance to spend a week there, when I was doing my research. And the Russian concierge, Elizaveta Snegursky, is the apple of a lot of men's eyes, including, it should be said, Robert Dwyer. Robert Dwyer is infatuated with Elizaveta, buys her gifts all of the time. And Edmund Bodine becomes equally infatuated with Elizaveta Snegursky. But unlike Dwyer, Bodine succeeds in asking Elizaveta out on a date, and they quickly become an item.
Michel Paradis:
But Bodine has a problem. He has really no reason to be in Shanghai anymore. Men are being shipped back by the hundred almost every day, and so he needs a reason to stay in Shanghai, to essentially be with a girl. And when this opportunity comes along to be the defense attorney for the Japanese, it's not an appealing prospect, but he assumes his job is to just stand there and respectively lose. And so it seems like the best and really only way he can stay with this woman that he's fallen in love with. And so that's how he gets picked. It's a terrible decision.
Josh King:
Tell me about what the postwar atmosphere is like both in Shanghai, but also at home. The balance of a citizenry that wanted to return to their homes, their farms, their jobs take advantage of the peace that was finally at hand, versus this equally ingrained thirst for revenge for atrocities committed during war time.
Michel Paradis:
Absolutely. Certainly, in the first six months after the end of World War II, newspapers are chock a block full, with reports of Japanese atrocities. You have to remember, thousands upon thousands of prisoners of war are being released and coming home with these just horrifying stories of what they experienced in World War II, and it's sensational news coverage. And so the idea that there might even be an opportunity for justice for all that happened to the Doolittle Raiders is catnip for the press. And it's something the public is just clamoring for. Go to Shanghai, and Shanghai is kind of the Grand Hotel writ large, it's an entire city that has become, at least for the first few months after the war, under the spell of victory.
Michel Paradis:
You have hand sewn American flags hanging from the windows. The world is America's oyster. And so, being deployed in Shanghai, as Bodine and Dwyer were, they respectively start working on this Doolittle case. Dwyer ultimately puts it together, comes up with some extremely innovative and ultimately historically important decisions about how this case should be prosecuted. And Bodine basically does his best enjoying the opportunity to spend more time with this woman that he's fallen in love with.
Josh King:
So take us through the trial and its verdict and why you wrote, "It really makes you think the best about humanity and about what America is capable of doing."
Michel Paradis:
Sure. So, the thirst for revenge is understandable, right? It goes back, and it actually forms the basis of legal codes going back to Hammurabi. The desire for revenge is what motivated the Japanese to not only torture the Doolittle Raiders, but to then execute them in a show trial. Blood for blood, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And that was certainly what most people expected the Doolittle trial to be, in Shanghai, ultimately in '46, when the case is tried. But what happens is that Bodine, almost despite himself, decides that he just has to be the lawyer for the Japanese. He can't just stand there as a potted plant. He has to do the best he can, even though he is not a lawyer, to give them a fair trial. And Dwyer, to his credit, does the best he can to give them a fair trial.
Michel Paradis:
He avoids taking a lot of cheap shots and cheap opportunities that were certainly available to him. And I think almost just as impressive, if not even more, is the five military officers who are essentially assigned to be the judges and jury in the case, they take it seriously. They want to put on a fair trial. And so what you have is, instead of this opportunity for revenge, instead of literally an eye for an eye, is you have a fair trial, and everyone basically commits to the truth, commits to fairness.
Michel Paradis:
And it's not unlike George Washington declining to be king and deciding to step down as President. It's one of those remarkable moments where the United States was certainly able, nothing was standing in its way from simply giving into the blood lust that would've been, not only understandable, but traditional in the context. But instead, they asserted US values. They asserted the value to a fair trial, to have mercy be a part of justice.
Michel Paradis:
And that to me is an incredible moment of restraint, right? It's the opportunity to say, we have the power to do what we want to do, to do what everyone is asking and clamoring for us to do, but we are going to restrain ourselves with truth, justice and the American way, because this is a model, not only that we live by in the United States, but it's a model for the world. And it is ultimately a model for the world, and becomes part of international law. The idea of requiring a fair trial was simply not part of international law until this point, because the United States is able to lead the world, not only through the force of its victory, but through the force and persuasiveness of its values.
Josh King:
So the Geneva Convention, ratified in 1949, has found its own place in legend and lore, and many movie scripts it shows up in, but as a canon of international law, it still holds up and owes a great debt to the Doolittle trial for some of its most important tenets. Break some of that down, again.
Michel Paradis:
So the Geneva Conventions set down the minimum standards that we expect countries to live up to when dealing with prisoners of war, and even people who might not be specifically entitled to being prisoners of war. Let's say they're accused of being war criminals, of having committed atrocities. The Geneva Conventions goes one step further and says, you can't treat them arbitrarily. You can't hang them and lynch them. You can't treat them as the Axis powers treated them throughout World War II.
Michel Paradis:
Instead, they're entitled to be put before a regularly constituted court, and they're entitled to all the judicial guarantees. The right to testify on their own behalf, the right to the assistance of counsel, the right to have the evidence against them known to them, the right to not have evidence tainted by torture used against them. And only then, once you've been given these judicial guarantees that are recognized as indispensable by all civilized people, only then can anything like justice or punishment be imposed upon you.
Michel Paradis:
That's just a remarkable innovation that I think it's very easy for us to take for granted today. But there had been earlier war crimes treaties, including a Geneva Convention of 1929, which imposed nothing like the specificity, nothing like the demand for, not only humane treatment of prisoners, but values-based treatment of prisoners. And that's something that United States should be incredibly proud of, that we tempered the desire for revenge with our commitment to justice, and that's now part of international law. And so, anytime there's a risk of us abandoning that, not only are we risking violating international law, we're risking a legacy that we created at the moment of our probably greatest historical triumph, which was the end of World War II.
Josh King:
And in a unique way, Chase Nielsen found some solace in all this.
Michel Paradis:
He did. I think he certainly would've said he found the trial itself, having to sit on the witness stand and testify as to all that happened to him, and then to have to undergo cross examination, I think he certainly found that bruising, as anyone who has ever had to testify certainly would. But by the time he left Shanghai, he was able to, I think, get a certain kind of closure, the way really that only a trial can, for victims of crime. And even though I think he was certainly disappointed at the time, by the sentence, which I won't spoil, but everyone's expecting a death sentence, and something less than death is imposed.
Michel Paradis:
At the time, Nielsen is certainly disappointed that a death sentence wasn't imposed, but it also was an opportunity for him to reflect on all that he had done in the war. And writing years later, he reflects on the trial as again, a great achievement, an application of the golden rule, an opportunity where the United States gave the Japanese what the Japanese had refused to give us. And for that, he was able to live the rest of his life his family, in the glow of being one of the greatest American heroes of the Second World War, and enjoying the legacy that something like the Doolittle trial was able to create, for all he had suffered.
Josh King:
So let's not spoil the ending, let's skip ahead 75 years to 2020. Michel, a ravaging virus is still spreading across the country, we're 100 days from a consequential election, there's unrest in the cities and the civil war is combusting anew around things like the signage on America's most powerful military bases, the places where those generals that I mentioned in the introduction, Lemay, Arnold and Doolittle and his Raiders, and their lawyers all lived and were trained.
Josh King:
10 US Army bases are still named in honor of Confederate generals. You recently wrote this piece for Atlantic that puts us in the time of Woodrow Wilson, when we had to draft and train a new Army to fight in Europe, and most of that training was better done in the warmer climes, breathing new life into the lost cause. I mean, in some respects, the way you lay it out, it was kind of a practical plan from a marketing standpoint, to put the signs on these bases of the generals that had led the Confederacy just 50 years prior.
Michel Paradis:
So yeah, the basic history is that the naming of US Army bases after Confederate generals comes at the start of the First World War, when both Woodrow Wilson, who's the first President to hail from the former Confederacy is President, but also at a time when the lost cause is a cultural and political movement, particularly in the American South. There had been efforts underway for the previous 20 years to have all sorts of statues built to Confederate luminaries, to have memorials built to the Ku Klux Klan. And there had been, unsuccessfully to that point, efforts to have military bases named after Confederate generals.
Michel Paradis:
Wilson is both dispositionally and also its his political base, is much more sympathetic to this view of the lost cause, and because as you said, there was a need for some good marketing, and they were building these bases in the American South, there was this choice made to name the bases after Confederate generals to essentially appeal to this cultural movement, this sense of nationalism in the South that the federal government was essentially hoping to exploit in order to bolster Southern support for the war. And particularly the draft, which was still quite controversial.
Josh King:
In 1917, at a speech at a Confederate memorial in Virginia, President Wilson said, and I'm going to quote him here, "There are many memories of the Civil War that thrill along the blood and make one proud to have sprung of a race that could produce such bravery and constancy." And he went on, and this is another quote, "Heroic things were done on both sides." It has echoes even today. As we close Michel, how would major Robert Dwyer and Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Bodine adjudicate that question, both at the time they argued back and forth in Shanghai, and today, if they were back at Fort Hood, Fort Bragg or Fort Benning?
Michel Paradis:
I think the way they would litigate it, if you're asking me to try and get in the minds of these people, and maybe this is the way we should litigate it, and I think this is perhaps a link between both my book and this article that I wrote is, history matters. History matters because it tells us the good things that bad people did for bad reasons. It tells us the bad things that good people did for bad reasons, and we have to understand and respect our history warts and all, in order to be able to move on, to grow as a country, to not always have to be re-litigating the same old fights. I think the Confederate memorials, and particularly the naming of the Confederate bases is disturbing because in 1917, there's no way of getting around this, it was direct appeal to racism.
Michel Paradis:
The lost cause was about racism. It was about white supremacy. It was an effort to argue that the Civil War was not about slavery, it was just about white supremacy. And so, the idea that we maintain these memorials and monuments to white supremacy is something, I just don't think that's a heritage, a legacy that we should still be celebrating 100 years later.
Michel Paradis:
However, I think it's also important to understand that whether they're the founding fathers, whether or not it's Robert Dwyer, Jimmy Doolittle, Chase Nielsen and Edmund Bodine, no one is perfect. And I think it's important that we be able to look at our history with clarity of vision, because if all of our ancestors are angels, what are we to do?
Michel Paradis:
We're imperfect people. We make mistakes, we do bad things for good reasons. We do good things for bad reasons, just as our ancestors did. And so, forever to have a sense of common purpose in looking to the future and not simply litigating the past, I think it's important that we look at the past with as clear an eye as possible and recognize that our ancestors did amazingly great things. The same people who ultimately insisted on war crimes trials, as opposed to just blank revenge against the Axis powers were the same people who had interned the Japanese.
Michel Paradis:
And so, are they perfect? No. But we have to be able to look back at the successes for our values, and take those lessons from them, and think about how we can sort of be able to use our history as a way of moving forward.
Josh King:
Well, looking at the past with as clear eyes as possible, you've certainly done that. Michel Paradis, thank you so much for joining us inside the ICE house.
Michel Paradis:
Thank you so much.
Josh King:
That is our conversation for this week. Our guest was Michel Paradis, author of Last Mission to Tokyo, the Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes, so other folks know where to find us. And if you get a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us, @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the remote library of the New York Stock Exchange, here in the Catskills of upstate New York. Thanks for listening. Stay safe. We'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified, neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
