There’s a lot more to the story of Pearl Harbor than Hollywood’s latest movie epic — with its sentimental, fictional love story — would have you believe. In fact, the Disney version pales in comparison to the true stories that came out of that terrible time.
Take for example the story of Jacob DeShazer, who was on KP duty in California when he first heard of the attack. Furious at what the Japanese had done, he resolved to retaliate personally. And in April, 1942, he got his chance — as a B-25 bombardier when Doolittle’s Raiders attacked Tokyo.
During that fateful run, DeShazer’s plane ran out of fuel and the crew bailed out over enemy territory. DeShazer was captured and spent the next forty months as a POW — including thirty-four months in solitary confinement. Three of his buddies were executed and another died of slow starvation.
With lots of time to think, Jake wondered: What makes people hate each other? And he also wondered: Doesn’t the Bible say something about loving our enemies?
He asked his jailers for a Bible and eventually got one. He read it with fascination, re-reading some parts six or more times. Then, ten days into his study, he asked Christ to forgive his sins. He remembers, “suddenly … when I looked at the enemy officers and guards, … I realized that … if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel. … [My]bitter hatred … changed to loving pity.” Remembering Christ’s words from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” [Luke 23:34] he asked God to forgive his torturers too.
Fourteen months later, in August 1945, paratroopers liberated DeShazer from his prison cell. After the war, a chaplain on General MacArthur’s staff wanted something to help heal the animosity between the U.S. and Japan. He approached Don Falkenberg of Bible Literature International, who had read DeShazer’s testimony shortly after his release. And soon the story was being circulating as a booklet called, “I Was a Prisoner of Japan.”
And here’s where the story out-dramatizes Hollywood. Japanese Navy pilot Mitsuo Fuchida was Chief Commander of the historic December 7th raid on Pearl Harbor. He had advised against raiding the American base, but when given orders to proceed, Fuchida led the assault.
Eventually he logged more than ten thousand combat hours. But Fuchida’s closest brush with death was on the ground in Japan. He was in Hiroshima the day before the atom bomb was dropped. His life was spared when Headquarters summoned him to Tokyo.
When the war ended, Captain Fuchida then returned to his family farm near Osaka. Later, stepping off a train in Tokyo, he was given a copy of DeShazer’s pamphlet that stimulated him to start reading the Bible. And despite his Shinto heritage, he accepted Christ as his Savior.
How marvelous are God’s ways? An American airman is taken prisoner, is converted, and his testimony leads his captors’ ace pilot to Christ.
[see also HolwickID #1507]
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BreakPoint for July 9, 2001:
“From Pearl Harbor to Calvary: Forgiving Our Enemies”
What a humiliation! Captain Mitsuo Fuchida had been a national hero and after leading hundreds of Japanese pilots in the historic raid on Pearl Harbor, he might have expected more.
But suddenly he was a has-been — a defeated ex-flying officer in a military that had been defeated and disbanded. And this in a culture where “losing face” was the ultimate disgrace. Deeply dispirited after Japan’s defeat, Fuchida returned to farming near Osaka.
When American occupation forces allowed Japan to rebuild a new air force, you would think he would jump at the invitation to head the organization. What could be more appealing than to rebuild his status and prestige?
But Captain Fuchida had found something much more important to do! He says: “As I got off the train one day in Tokyo’s Shibuya Station, I saw an American distributing literature… He handed me a pamphlet entitled, ‘I Was a Prisoner in Japan.’ … Involved right then with the trials on atrocities committed against war prisoners, I put it in my pocket … What I read [later] was the fascinating episode that changed my life.”
The idea that American bombardier Jacob DeShazer could love his Japanese captors piqued Fuchida’s interest. He says, “[H]is story … was something I could not explain…. The peaceful motivation I had read about was exactly what I was seeking. Since the American had found it in the Bible, I decided to purchase one myself….”
“I read … the prayer of Jesus Christ at His death: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’ [Luke 23:34]. I was impressed that I was certainly one of those for whom He had prayed. The many men I had killed had been slaughtered in the name of patriotism, for I did not understand the love that Christ wishes to implant within every heart.
“Right at that moment,” he says, “I seemed to meet Jesus for the first time…. I requested Him to forgive my sins and change me from a bitter, disillusioned ex-pilot into a well-balanced Christian with purpose in living.”
So that’s why, when his country asked him to rebuild its air force, Fuchida declined. Instead, Captain Fuchida and Sergeant DeShazer traveled together throughout Japan, telling others how Christ had transformed their lives. Together and separately — over a thirty-year span — they saw tens of thousands of Japanese converted.
The current Disney film PEARL HARBOR is a fictional love story set at the time of the raid on Pearl Harbor. Most people find it kind of soapy. But, as so often happens, truth is far more riveting than fiction. If your neighbors and friends are seeing the film tell them they really ought to know the true story.
Learning to love our enemies is important. It’s something we’re deeply committed to here at Prison Fellowship and it’s exciting whenever it happens. But in wartime it’s a miracle — a miracle of restoration and healing that can only come through faith in Christ.
For further information:
A version of the brochure is available at BLI < http://www.bli.org/ > , where you can also find printer-friendly versions of the two men’s testimonies:
Jacob DeShazer, “I Was a Prisoner of Japan,” http://www.bli.org/pearlharbor/printjacob.htm
Mitsuo Fuchida, “From Pearl Harbor to Calvary,” http://www.bli.org/pearlharbor/printmitsuo.htm
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Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint with Chuck Colson” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
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Adapted from Wikipedia.org:
After the Second World War, Mitsuo Fuchida, who had been the lead pilot for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was called on to testify at the trials of some of the Japanese military for Japanese war crimes. This infuriated him as he believed this was little more than “victor’s justice.” In the spring of 1947, convinced that the Americans had treated the Japanese the same way and determined to bring that evidence to the next trial, Fuchida went to Uraga Harbor near Yokosuka to meet a group of returning Japanese prisoners of war. He was surprised to find his former flight engineer, Kazuo Kanegasaki, who all had believed had died in the Battle of Midway. When questioned, Kanegasaki told Fuchida that they were not tortured or abused, much to Fuchida’s disappointment, then went on to tell him of a young lady, Peggy Covell, who served them with the deepest love and respect, but whose parents, missionaries, had been killed by Japanese soldiers on the island of Panay in the Philippines [Covell ministered to Japanese Americans in internment camps, but probably did not minister to Japanese POWs; see #18866].
For Fuchida, this was inexplicable, as in the Bushido code revenge was not only permitted, it was “a responsibility” for an offended party to carry out revenge to restore honor. The murderer of one’s parents would be a sworn enemy for life. He became almost obsessed trying to understand why anyone would treat their enemies with love and forgiveness.
In the fall of 1948, Fuchida was passing by the bronze statue of Hachiko at the Shibuya Station when he was handed a pamphlet about the life of Jacob DeShazer, a member of the Doolittle Raid who was captured by the Japanese after his B-25 bomber ran out of fuel over occupied China. In the pamphlet, “I Was a Prisoner of Japan” DeShazer, himself a former U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sergeant and bombardier, told his story of imprisonment, torture and his account of an “awakening to God.” This experience increased Fuchida’s curiosity of the Christian faith. In September 1949, after reading the Bible for himself, he became a Christian. In May 1950, Fuchida and DeShazer met for the first time. The Japanese airman became an evangelist for the rest of his life.
[see also HolwickID #3992]