|
Bombardier on first US raid on
Japan brought
leader of the attack on Pearl Harbour
to Christ |
Bulletin 2008-06 |
|
 |
On April 18, 1942, crewmen in 16
Army Air Force 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 Harbour. The raid resulted in only
light damage to military and industrial targets, but it buoyed
an American home front stunned by Japanese advances during the
war’s first four months.
Corporal DeShazer, a native of Oregon and the son of a Church of
God minister, was among 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. |
Jacob DeShazer,
a bombardier in the storied Doolittle raid over Japan in World
War II who endured 40 months of brutality as a prisoner of the
Japanese, then became a missionary in Japan spreading a message
of Christian love and forgiveness, died on March 15 at his home
in Salem, Ore. He was 95.
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 most of their time
in solitary confinement — until their liberation a few days after
Japan’s surrender in August 1945.
Amid his misery, Corporal DeShazer had one source of solace.
“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 Saviour and that if Christ is
not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel.”
There's a lot of suffering to be
entered into in this world - the kind of suffering Christ takes on.
I welcome the chance to take my share in the Church's part of that
suffering (Col 1:24-26, The Message).
Corporal DeShazer gained the strength to survive, and he became
determined to spread Christian teachings to his enemy.
Upon returning home, he enrolled at Seattle Pacific College (now
Seattle Pacific University) and received a bachelor’s degree in
biblical literature in 1948. He arrived in Japan with Florence, also
a graduate of Seattle Pacific and a fellow missionary in the Free
Methodist Church, in late December 1948. A few days later, he
preached his first sermon there, speaking to about 180 people at a
Free Methodist church in a Tokyo suburb.
In 1950, he gained a remarkable convert.
Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese naval flier who had led the Pearl
Harbour attack and had become a rice farmer after the war, came
upon the DeShazer tract.
“It was then that I met Jesus, and accepted him as my personal
saviour,” Mr. Fuchida recalled when he attended a memorial
service in Hawaii in observance of the 25th anniversary of the
attack. He had become an evangelist and had made several
trips to the United States to meet with Japanese-speaking
immigrants.
Mr. DeShazer spent 30 years in Japan doing missionary work,
interrupted only by a sabbatical to earn a master’s degree at Asbury
Theological Seminary in Kentucky in 1958.
In 2001, he was a guest at the premiere of the movie “Pearl
Harbour.”
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sons Mark, of
Winston, Ore.; John, of Coos Bay, Ore.; Paul, of Salem; daughters
Ruth Kutrakun of Seattle, and Carol Dixon of Chicago; a sister,
Helen Hindman of Iowa City; 10 grandchildren; and 6
great-grandchildren.
Over the years, Mr. DeShazer met on several occasions with Mr.
Fuchida, who died in 1976.
“I saw him just before he died,” Mr. DeShazer once told The Salem
Statesman Journal. “We shared in that good wonderful thing that
Christ has done.”
Click here for source:
New York Times
23 March 2008
By Richard Goldstein
Therefore, if anyone is in
Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through
Christ
and gave us the ministry of reconciliation (2
Cor 5:17-18 NIV)
For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him
(Jesus), and through him
to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on
earth or things in heaven,
by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross (Col
1:19-20 NIV).
Your Occupation is Your Ministry
|
