Chase J. Nielson - $30.00

Lieutenant Colonel Nielsen, a lieutenant at the time, was the navigator of The Green Hornet, the sixth B-25 to launch from the deck of the USS Hornet on April 18, 1942. Most of the aircraft were able to reach land (but did not land due to low or no fuel) after their mission, but two, including Colonel Nielsen's, were forced to ditch off the coast of China. Two men were killed in the ditching. Eight men in all were taken prisoner by the Japanese and held in inhumane conditions from which four survived. Along with Robert Hite and Jacob DeShazer, Colonel Nielsen spent 40 months as a prisoner of war, most of the time in solitary confinement, before being rescued (August 20, 1945) at the end of the war by an Office of Strategic Services para-rescue team and brought back to the U.S. Colonel Nielsen returned to Shanghai, China, 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.