Lieutenant Robert L. Hite

On 03 March 1920  Robert Lowell Hite was born as the first child out of the marriage of  Robert Parks Hite and Lena Dorothea Attaway Hite. 

Robert's father Robert Parks Hite 

Lena Dorothea Attaway Hite, Robert's wife. Mother of Robert Hite.

Robert Lowell Hite was born in Odell, Texas. He had one younger brother named Kennith Frank Hite. When Hite was born his parents were cotton farmers.

Kenneth Frank Hite

After three years at West Texas State Teachers College, he enlisted as an aviation cadet in 1940 and he was certified an Army Air Corps pilot in 1941.

Bob Hite volunteered for the Doolittle misson and he accepted to fly with Nill Farrow. “After I accepted to go with Bill,” he recalled, referring to the pilot who chose him, William G. Farrow, “I had people offering me $500 for my place. I said, ‘No way.’ 

Bob was a Military Aviator. One of "Doolittle's Raiders" and was the co-pilot of B-25 bombers dubbed the "Bat Out of Hell"

The mission started inauspiciously for Bob Hite and crew 16. A sailor’s arm was severed wounded when he was blown into a propeller on the wind swept deck as Mr. Hite’s B-25 took off for Japan. But the plane, carrying four 500-pound bombs and nicknamed Bat Out of Hell, survived antiaircraft fire by flying as low as 500 feet as it struck a fuel depot and aircraft factory in Nagoya, southwest of Tokyo.

Short of fuel, however, the crew bailed out near Nanchang, China.  obert Hite landed in a rice paddy and was captured by Japanese soldiers.

He and other captured crew members were flown to Japan, where they were subjected to water torture. They were then imprisoned in China, tried as war criminals for strafing civilians and sentenced to death.

Hite’s crew hit a fuel depot and a factory in Nagoya. Of the aircraft, only one landed safely in Allied territory. The remainder were either shot down or crash-landed in Japanese-occupied China. As said Bob Hite‘s crew was captured and spent the remainder of the war in a POW camp and tortured for the next three years. 

“We were war criminals according to the Japanese because we had attacked their homeland,” Bob Hite recalled, adding: “To save face, they had to designate someone responsible and execute them. So they designated the first pilots and the gunners.”

After three were executed, Hite and four others were granted a reprieve, though they were told that they would be shot if Japan lost the war. He remained in prison until Japan’s surrender in August 1945, then released, which he termed a miracle.

After the war ended, he continued to serve. He married his first wife Portia in 1946, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

After returning home, he married Portia Wallace. She died in 1999. Mr. Hite died in a Nashville nursing home.

In 1955, Hite moved his family to Arkansas where he took a job as manager of a hotel.  Here in 1961, he hosted a convention of Doolittle Raid veterans. He went on to manage a series of hotels before his retirement in 1984.

Recalled during the Korean War,  Hite trained pilots until he left active duty in 1955. Afterward, he operated hotels in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas. He retired at 51, his son said, “because of the wear and tear of the 40 months he was a prisoner.”

That emotional toll had been lightened when his jailers provided the captured crew with a copy of the King James Bible, Mr. Hite said in an oral history for the Air Force Historical Research Agency.

“We were no longer afraid to the extent that we had been, at least,” Hite recalled. “We no longer had the hatred.”

Robert Hite was imprisoned for 40 months, 38 of them in solitary confinement. His weight had dropped to 76 pounds from 180 when the war ended.

We can conclude that Robert Hite paid a heavy price for our freedom. He was one of the Raiders unlucky enough to be captured. Captured by the Japanese on 19 April 1942. A Japanese kangaroo court sentenced Hite to death along with the seven other American airmen captured in the raid. Three of these men, Hite’s pilot, William Farrow, his gunner, Harold Spatz along with fellow pilot Dean Hallmark were all subsequently shot to death. This of course pales in comparison to the reprisals Imperial Japan exacted with a ferocious appetite upon countless thousands of Chinese civilians for aiding the majority of the Doolittle Raiders to escape.

Left to right : DeShazer, Hite and Nielsen

For some reason Hite and the four others were spared the firing squad, although each was told that they too would be executed should Japan lose the war. Hite endured the next three years withering under the brutal hammer that every Imperial Japanese prison camp wielded against its inmates. He spent 38 of those 40 months in solitary confinement. As a testament of just how severe his treatment was, and as a measure of his strength as a man in that he survived, Robert Hite weighed just 76lbs when he gained his freedom in August, 1945. He had been 180lbs before his imprisonment. 

Robert Hite married his first wife Portia Faires Wallace Hite in 1947. The couple had 2 children. One son and one daughter. His wife Portia Faires Wallace Hite died in July 1999. Later he remarried the widow of another Doolittle raider William Fitzhugh.  Dorothea Louise “Dot” Pursley Fitzhugh-Hite died during 2012.

Dorothea Louise “Dot” Pursley Fitzhugh-Hite

Robert Lowell Hite had Alzheimer. He died on a heart failure on 29 March 2015 The cause was heart failure.

Bob was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame on 9 November 2001 and the Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame.

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