This is a specially produced bookplate with an original pencil drawing with white highlights by Steve Teasdale. The portrait features Doolittle raider Robert Hite and bears the genuine signature of Hite professionally mounted underneath. He was one of the Raiders unlucky enough to be captured after the historic raid. 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, Lt.William Farrow, his gunner, Cpl.Harold Spatz along with fellow pilot Lt.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. 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.