NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Lt. Col. Robert Hite, one of the famed World War II "Doolittle Tokyo Raiders" and a former longtime resident of Camden in south Arkansas, has died at the age of 95.
Wallace Hite said his father died Sunday morning at a nursing home facility in Nashville. He was battling Alzheimer's disease.
Hite was among 80 men aboard 16 B-25 bombers whose mission was to strike Japan in 1942. While the attack inflicted only scattered damage, it was credited with boosting U.S. morale while shaking Japan's confidence and prompting strategy shifts less than five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Hite was among eight men who survived crash-landings after their mission but were captured by the Japanese. Three of them were executed and five were tried in a Japanese tribunal, Wallace Hite said in a telephone interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2013.
The five faced life in prison at hard labor if the Japanese won the war and execution if the Japanese lost. As it turned out, Wallace Hite said, U.S. forces liberated the condemned men before the sentences could be carried out.
Robert Hite spent two months in prison with 60 others. He was put in solitary confinement "in a 5-foot by 5-foot by 9-foot cell" for 38 months, Wallace Hite said.
On Aug. 15, 1945, the U.S. Marines freed the imprisoned men. Robert Hite was later stationed at Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Okla., where he met his future wife, Portia.
After the war, Camden leaders decided to build a hotel and asked Hite to manage it. The city built the 72-room, six-story Hotel Camden in 1952 to help revive the city's postwar economy.
He was inducted into several aviation halls of fame, including Arkansas' in 2004. About three years later, Robert Hite moved to Tennessee to be closer to some family members.
Metro on 03/30/2015