Real Courage

It is rather ironic that Vice President Pence finds himself in Japan today… the 75th anniversary of the Dolittle Raid on Tokyo.

On April 18, 1942, crewmen in 16 Army Air Forces B-25 bombers, commanded by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, flew from the carrier Hornet on a daylight bombing raid that brought the war home to Japan for the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The raid resulted in only minimal damage to military and industrial targets. However, it encouraged people back in the U.S. who were discouraged by Japan’s advances in the first four months of the war.

I was always fascinated with the story of Jimmy Doolittle. He was a pioneer in aviation and a real character… and I always enjoy characters! Still, when I think of the Doolittle raid I am more interested in Corporal Jacob DeShazer, a native of Oregon and one of the five-member crew of Bat Out of Hell, the last bomber to depart the Hornet. His plane dropped incendiary bombs on an oil installation and a factory in Nagoya but it ran out of fuel before the pilot could try a landing at an airfield held by America’s Chinese allies.

The five crewmen bailed out over Japanese-occupied territory in China and all were quickly captured. In October 1942, a Japanese firing squad executed the pilot, Lt. William G. Farrow, and the engineer-gunner, Sgt. Harold A. Spatz, along with a captured crewman from another Doolittle raid plane. Corporal DeShazer and the other surviving crewmen from his plane, Lt. George Barr, the navigator, and Lt. Robert L. Hite, the co-pilot, were starved, beaten and tortured at prisons in Japan and China — spending 40 months in solitary confinement — until their liberation a few days after Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

Amid his very real struggles, Corporal DeShazer had one source of encouragement.

“I begged my captors to get a Bible for me,” he recalled in “I Was a Prisoner of Japan,” a religious tract he wrote in 1950. “At last, in the month of May 1944, a guard brought me the book, but told me I could have it only for three weeks. I eagerly began to read its pages. I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes and that when I looked at the enemy officers and guards who had starved and beaten my companions and me so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity. I realized that these people did not know anything about my Savior and that if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel.”

After being repatriated to the States, Jacob enrolled at Seattle Pacific College and received a bachelor’s degree in 1948. He returned to Japan with his wife, Florence, as missionaries with the Free Methodist Church, in late December 1948. 

In 1950, he was privileged to share his faith story with a very remarkable man. Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese naval flier who had led the Pearl Harbor attack and had become a rice farmer after the war, read DeShazer's tract.

“It was then that I met Jesus, and accepted him as my personal savior,” Mr. Fuchida recalled when he attended a memorial service in Hawaii in observance of the 25th anniversary of the attack. Mr. Fuchida went on to become an evangelist and even made several trips to the United States to meet with Japanese-speaking immigrants.

Mr. DeShazer spent 30 years in Japan doing missionary work. I respect that. Flying on the Doolittle Raid was something. However, living your life on purpose to reach others in another culture for that many years took real courage and faith.

Over the years, Mr. DeShazer met Mr. Fuchida on several occasions. “I saw him just before he died (in 1976),” Mr. DeShazer once told The Salem Statesman Journal. “We shared in that good wonderful thing that Christ has done.”