Lieutenant Chase J. Nielsen

Chase J. Nielsen was born in Hyrum, Utah to Don Carlos Floyd Nielsen and Chatherine (Carrie) Ann  Miller Nielsen, who were of Danish, Swedish, Prussian, and Welsh descent. Chase J. Nielsen was one of six children born to the family and was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1935, he graduated from South Cache High School in Hyrum, Utah and then attended Utah State University, where he graduated in 1939 with a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering.

He married Cleo Rayona McCrary on 17 July 1946 in the Logan, Utah Temple.The couple had 3 children. Two sons and one daughter. 

After the death of his wife on 5 February 1995 he married Phyllis Henderson Nielsen on 1 July 1995. She had three children from her first marriage. Together they have 12 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren.

Nielsen was the navigator for sixth bomber, plane# 40-2298 nicknamed "The Green Hornet", to depart the deck of the USS Hornet during the mission. On April 18, 1942, Nielsen and his B-25's four crewmembers, took off from the Hornet and reached Tokyo, Japan. They bombed their target; a steel mill in the northern part of the city. They then headed for their recovery airfield in China. Running low on fuel due to the early launch of the raid, the B-25s failed to reach any of the designated safety zones in China. The pilot of Meder's bomber, First Lieutenant Dean E. Hallmark, was forced to ditch at sea off the coast of Wenzhou, China. Second Lieutenant William J. Dieter (bombardier) and Sergeant Donald E. Fitzmaurice (gunner) drowned when the aircraft ditched into the sea, while Nielsen, Hallmark and co-pilot Robert J. Meder managed to swim ashore. The next day, they buried the bodies of Fitzmaurice and Dieter.

On 27 April 1942 as they tried to reach safety with the help of friendly local Chinese, all three men were captured by Japanese troops and interred as POWs in Shanghai, along with crew of the sixteenth bomber. Nielsen and other American prisoners were held in solitary confinement, where they were threatened and tortured by the Japanese, but resisted weeks of interrogation. The Japanese government sentenced all the eight prisoners to death and after a mock trial on October 14, 1942, Hallmark, William G. Farrow (pilot of bomber#16) and Sergeant Harold A. Spatz (gunner of bomber#16) were selected for execution, while the Japanese commuted others to life in prison. The three men were executed on October 15, 1942, at Shanghai's Public Cemetery No. 1.

Nielsen and other prisoners of the raid were placed in solitary confinement and on the anniversary of the Doolittle Raid in 1943, the prisoners were transferred to a military prison at Nanking, where Meder died in December 1943, due to malnutrition and beri-beri. Meder's death resulted in the improvement of conditions for Nielsen and the remaining prisoners of the raid. On August 20, 1945, Nielsen and other prisoners were rescued at the end of the war by an Office of Strategic Services para-rescue team and brought back to the U.S. Later Nielsen returned to Shanghai in January 1946 to testify in the trials against his former captors, who had tortured him with waterboarding, then called the "water cure. Extracts from his testimony were later presented at the Tokyo Trial.

Chse Jay Nielsen was the only crew member of Crew 06 who survived Word War 2. 

He was inducted into the Utah Aviation Hall of Fame on 30 May 2002.

Left to right : DeShazer, Hite and Nielsen

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Main source for this article is Wikipedia.