Jacob DeShazer spent 40 months as a prisoner of war in Japan, 34 of them in solitary confinement. On August 20, 1945, the door of his cell in a military prison in Peking finally opened. He was one of four American flyers from the Doolittle Raid who walked out of Japanese captivity alive. Of the eight raiders captured by the Japanese, three had been executed and one had died of disease.
DeShazer was a bombardier from Madras, Oregon. He had flown in the last bomber of the 16-plane raid on April 18, 1942, launched from the carrier Hornet. His aircraft, nicknamed Bat Out of Hell, was piloted by Lieutenant William Farrow, a 23-year-old from South Carolina. The raid launched hours early after a Japanese picket boat spotted the task force, meaning the crews did not have enough fuel to reach their intended landing fields in China.
Farrow’s crew bombed the Mitsubishi aircraft plant in Nagoya from 500 feet, hitting an oil storage tank. They then turned west across the sea, but ran out of fuel in the dark over China. All five crewmen bailed out near Nanchang, territory held by the Japanese army. Within days, every one of them was captured.
Three men from another crew that crashed into the sea off the Chinese coast were also taken prisoner. Eight raiders in total fell into Japanese hands. The prisoners were interrogated for weeks. Chase Nielsen, the navigator of the second crew, later testified about the water cure, a form of torture now known as waterboarding.
A Japanese military court at Kiangwan, outside Shanghai, tried all eight for bombing civilians. The trial lasted about two hours, and the flyers had no lawyer and no interpreter, according to an American war crimes commission that later reviewed the case. All eight were sentenced to death. On October 15, 1942, a firing squad executed Farrow, pilot Dean Hallmark, and gunner Harold Spatz at a public cemetery outside Shanghai.
The other five had their sentences reduced to life in prison. Farrow wrote a last letter to his mother, but it was never mailed; it stayed in a Japanese file. On the first anniversary of the raid, the five survivors were moved to a military prison in Nanking, where they were kept in solitary cells. Robert Meder, the co-pilot, weakened throughout the year and died of hunger and beri-beri in December 1943.
After his death, conditions for the remaining four improved slightly. DeShazer was 29 when he was captured. In a tract he later wrote called “I Was a Prisoner of Japan,” he described the hatred he felt. “My hatred for the enemy nearly drove me crazy,” he wrote.
In May 1944, the prisoners were allowed a Bible. DeShazer later wrote that a guard brought him the book and told him he could only have it for three weeks. He was not a religious man, but he read it through from the beginning. On June 8, 1944, he wrote, he gave himself over to what he had found in it.
He would remain in a cell for more than another year. In June 1945, the four survivors were moved north to Peking. On August 20, 1945, after the Japanese surrender, an American team from the Office of Strategic Services reached the prison and got them out. DeShazer, along with Dite, Barr, and Nielsen, had survived.
Nielsen later returned to Shanghai to testify at the war crimes trials from February to April 1946. An American military commission tried four Japanese officers connected to the treatment of the eight flyers: the general who commanded the 13th Army, two judges from the Kangwan court, and the prison warden. All four were convicted, with the longest sentence being nine years at hard labor; the others received five years. DeShazer went home to Oregon and enrolled at Seattle Pacific College to train as a missionary.
In August 1946, he married Florence Methany, and their first son, Paul, was born the following year. DeShazer finished his degree in 1948, and the Free Methodist Church agreed to send the family to Japan. They sailed from San Francisco in December 1948 and landed at Yokohama 15 days later, settling in Osaka. DeShazer began preaching with a Japanese minister, the Reverend Kaneo Oda, who interpreted for him.
His tract had been printed in English and Japanese, with a million copies run off according to Christianity Today. It was handed out at stations and on street corners, telling the story of an American flyer held in Japanese prisons whose bitter hatred was changed to loving pity. The other man in this story is Mitsuo Fuchida. On the morning of December 7, 1941, he led the first wave of aircraft over Oahu and stayed overhead for nearly three hours directing the attack, according to Time magazine.
He was injured at Midway six months later and ended the war on the staff at naval headquarters. After the war, he returned to farming, bitter over the defeat. He later wrote, “Life had no taste or meaning. ”
How Fuchida first encountered DeShazer’s message is uncertain.
Time reported in 1952 that he had seen newspaper reports of DeShazer’s arrival in Japan. Fuchida’s own account says he got off a train at Shibuya Station in Tokyo and received a leaflet called “The Raiders” from an American handing out literature. One widely repeated version dates that moment to October 1948, months before DeShazer actually landed in Japan. The date of Fuchida’s conversion also varies across accounts, with some placing it in September 1949 and Fuchida himself writing that April 14, 1950 became the second day to remember of his life, the first being the day he led the attack.
Every account agrees on what Fuchida did next. He bought a Bible. He came to the Gospel of Luke and the words from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. ” In his own account, that line moved him to ask for forgiveness himself.
In the spring of 1950, he traveled to Osaka and went to DeShazer’s house. A photograph in DeShazer’s papers at Seattle Pacific University, labeled “Captain Fuchida and Reverend DeShazer,” shows them together at the house. The university’s description says the meeting began a friendship. On December 7, 1950, the ninth anniversary of the attack, the Pocket Testament League published a pamphlet under Fuchida’s name titled “I Bombed Pearl Harbor.
” Now there were two small pieces of paper circulating in Japan: one from a man who had bombed Nagoya and one from a man who had bombed Pearl Harbor, each telling a similar story in the first person. The two men spoke from the same platforms and drew large crowds, according to Christianity Today. Fuchida went to the United States to preach in 1952. The evangelist sponsoring the tour, the Reverend Elmer Sax of Sky Pilots International, told Time, “We’re honestly trying to build him up as the Apostle Paul of Japan.
” The organization also gave Fuchida the rank of a one-star general, meaning the man who never made admiral in the Imperial Navy received his star from an evangelical American organization. Historians have noted that Fuchida improved parts of his account of the Battle of Midway, and some details of his conversion come only from him. The conflicting dates are part of that. What can be checked from outside sources is thinner: a photograph, a pamphlet with a printing date, a magazine piece.
But they all point the same way. Among the people who came to the DeShazer house in 1950 was a man named Aota with his wife and children. A photograph of the two families identifies him as Jacob’s former prison guard, the one who gave him the Bible in prison. DeShazer also met another former guard named Misawa in those years.
No account survives of what was said on either visit, but both men came and posed for photographs with the prisoner they had once kept locked away. DeShazer stayed in Japan. By 1954, he was superintendent of the Free Methodist Mission there. In 1959, he moved to Nagoya and started a church.
The Christian History Institute credits the DeShazers with helping to found 23 churches over about 30 years in Japan. Fuchida continued preaching at home and abroad and wrote a book about his conversion called “From Pearl Harbor to Calvary. ” He died in Japan in 1976 at the age of 73. Jacob and Florence DeShazer came home to Oregon the following year and settled in Salem.
On March 15, 2008, Jacob DeShazer died in Salem at the age of 95. He left behind Florence and five children. He was buried at Restlawn Memory Gardens in West Salem, in a section called The Garden of Protection.