Viewing his picture in the July 6, 1942, Brookings Register, friends noticed how lean and gaunt he looked.
His Army Air Corps medal-adorned uniform seemed large for Don Smith’s once-sturdy frame when he was centering the ball for the Jackrabbits’ 1939 conference championship football team.
Perhaps it was the camera angle or the glaring flashbulb that made 24-year-old Captain Smith appear to have lost some of his hair ... there was a tint of gray at his temples.
Smith was recovering from malaria contracted in China. Less than three months had now passed since he and his fellow Doolittle Raiders – 80 strong – were being shunted about in the dead of night by friendly Chinese as squads of Japanese soldiers searched for them in three coastal provinces – Jiangxi, Anhui and Zhejiang, on China’s east coast.
Those searching soldiers were furious. The Americans they so desperately sought had just bombed their homeland. It was the first World War II American attack on the Land of the Rising Sun.
After the bombing run, Smith and the other pilots had crash-landed their fuel-starved, twin-engine B-25 bombers in the sea along China’s coastline after their historic raid. Most of Doolittle’s Raiders were now on the run after having been rescued by kindly members of the Chinese underground.
Hours before reaching the Chinese coast, Smith’s plane and 15 others had successfully called on all the power their aircraft’s two 1,700 HP Wright Cyclone supercharged, 14-cylinder engines could muster. Becoming airborne off the pitching deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet wasn’t something a B-25 Mitchell bomber was designed to do.
But with the help of strong head winds, the planes made it, and settled into formation for the long, low-level flight to Japan.
That historic takeoff and flight took place on April 28, 1942, less than three months before Smith’s Brookings visit.
The bombs he and the other pilots dropped on Japan were the incendiary type. To counter the extra weight for the one ton of explosives and spare fuel each aircraft carried, its machine guns had been removed; replaced with broomsticks painted black to give the impression the planes still had deadly defenses.
Smith and his compatriots had to leave the USS Hornet earlier than planned. The American armada escorting the carrier had been spotted by a Japanese picket ship. Before it could be destroyed, it managed to tap out a warning to the homeland.
When planning the Doolittle mission, it was computed that to ensure fuel enough for an escape flight to airfields in China, the launching of the planes would have to take place about 400 miles from Japan. After the early detection, it was necessary to leave the carrier 250 miles further out to sea.
Everyone in the squadron, aware of the danger, elected to carry out the mission despite those much lower odds, hoping for successful bailouts or survivable crash landings.
After takeoff, the agile B-25s leveled off for 650 fuel-gulping miles of flying to their Japanese targets, and then hundreds more to the Chinese mainland. The additional miles meant much slimmer survival odds.
Smith’s bomber and the 14 others followed the scout bomber piloted by then Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle. As 12,000-foot high Mt. Fugi loomed into view, the twin-tailed, agile B-25s climbed to their planned bombing altitude.
Surely by now, Japanese fighters were aloft and searching for the attackers.
Smith’s aircraft and some of the others peeled off and headed for Kobe, Japan’s sixth largest city. Other B-25s were tasked with bombing runs over Yokosuka and Osaka. Doolittle and his group headed for Tokyo, the heart of that nation.
Japanese anti-aircraft crews alerted by the picket ship had set their shell fuses to explode at 1,500 feet. Fortunately, Doolittle’s raiders cruised at 2,000 feet. Capt. Smith said later that he saw only four black-smoked shells explode below his aircraft.
While the bombing caused little damage, the raid wasn’t intended for that purpose alone. For five months since the war started on Dec. 7, 1941, everything had been going Japan’s way. The Doolittle raid provided Americans with a much-needed boost in morale.
The historic raid also dealt a psychological blow to the Japanese, who had been assured by their leaders that Japan was safe from attack.
After “bombs away,” all 16 aircraft set a course for the Chinese mainland, although one B-25 had to land in Russia.
Chinese patriots waiting for the planes had been alerted about the change in rescue plans. They watched along the coastline as the bombers splashed and skipped into the surf. Boats hurried through the breakers to rescue the Americans.
All of the airmen made it, although some had minor injuries. All were secretly silently shunted past searching, incensed Japanese troops. The goal was to reach airfields in friendly inland territory.
Eventually reaching those airfields, the relieved Doolittle Raiders were flown to safety. They would later learn that many of the Chinese partisans who helped them had paid dearly for their heroic efforts.
Smith and the other airmen were quickly returned to the United States, arriving 36 days after they took off from the Hornet, whose wartime nom de plume was Shangri-la, a mythical place of peace and perpetual youth.
Less than three months after that historic mission and the harrowing escape, Distinguished Flying Cross recipient Don Smith, still feeling the aftermath of malaria and slowly gaining weight lost during his ordeal in China, was headed for home at Belle Fourche.
Smith was born near Oldham, but as a young boy he was adopted by the Belle Fourche family.
En route to his West River home, he decided to detour for a quick stop in Brookings to see old friends.
At that time, Brookings citizens were fighting the war in their own way. Hundreds of tons of scrap metal were collected. Every other day a railcar of worn out kitchen stoves and rusting, retired-in-a-shelterbelt farm equipment were among the iron scraps leaving town for eastern smelters.
Housewives were encouraged to save cooking grease needed in gunpowder production. Mrs. T.V. Gulehus of Bruce was honored for donating the most – 104 pounds.
Old tires and tubes mingled with rubber jar lid rings and even rubber heels off shoes helped Brookings County collect more than 150 tons of rubber during the war.
Sugar, meat, gas and other ordinarily every-day items were rationed. Nationally, for example, men’s trouser cuffs were eliminated to save cloth.
As Smith arrived in Brookings, city leaders were in the process of planning for a town “blackout” practice. A school for air raid wardens was in the works. Brookings leaders had hired half-dozen armed men to guard the airport. Others kept watch at the city’s water wells.
The sale of war bonds and savings stamps contributed cash for the war effort.
Amid all this wartime hubbub, Smith spent a long June 30, 1942, in Brookings and at his alma mater. The local Rotary Club honored him at their noon meeting at the Sawnee Hotel (it’s still at the same place, different name and use), and that afternoon before the train left for West River country, Smith spent a few hours on campus.
He stopped for coffee at the Student Union Jungle Restaurant, then called The Shack.
The poultry science major borrowed a knife from the Shack’s kitchen and scratched his name on one of the pine carving boards lining the walls in The Shack that were placed there for just that purpose. He filled the carving of his name and class year with heavy black ink.
A Register photographer snapped his picture as he carved away eight decades ago.
When a new Student Union was built in 1975, those carving boards were removed and hauled to storage. Years later, several dozen boards, randomly selected, were retrieved to become a part of hallway decor in the new SDSU Alumni Center across Medary Avenue from the old Student Union. The Shack in that building is now part of a Pugsley Hall classroom.
Ironically, one of the boards destined for the new alumni center hallway just happened to carry that long-ago Don Smith carving he’d made before he resumed his train ride west to Belle Fourche and his parents, Dr. and Mrs. A.W. Smith.
Capt. Smith remained in Belle Fourche for a few weeks before reporting back to his base in California to await orders. By then, military leaders realized Doolittle’s Raiders were wanted men. If captured, they would likely face beheading, which was the fate of a few of the American raiders whom the Japanese had captured in China.
Capt. Smith was therefore assigned B-25 flying duties in the Atlantic Theater, reporting to an airbase in England to prepare for bombing missions in Europe.
On Nov. 14, 1942, five months after his carving episode in The Shack, on a flight over England in miserable English weather, his plane crashed and he was killed.
At that time during the early months of WWII, Smith became the fifth former State College football player to give his life. Before the end of the war, more than 100 State College men and one woman died for their country.
Smith and his fellow SDSU alumni were among more than 68,000 South Dakotans who served in the military during WWII. Of that number, 1,600 died in that war for their country.
