One of the most amazing books I ever read (Forgive your Enemies by Janet & Geoff Benge) was about Jacob DeShaver, a prisoner of war during World War II. What follows is his story. Enjoy - and please take a few moments to remember those who lost their lives defending our liberties.
Doolittle Airman Was a
Different Kind of War Hero
By Mel Barger
How do people forgive when they have endured
hideous cruelty from oppressors who have no desire to be forgiven? And can
there be a good outcome when such forgiveness is made?
The man who may have made the strongest case for
true forgiveness was Jacob DeShazer, an airman in the famous Doolittle raid over
Japan on April 18, 1942. He not only achieved it for himself, but went on to
touch the lives of thousands with his message of hope and redemption.
Under the heading of “War and Forgiveness,” The
Wall Street Journal on March 25 published an editorial tribute to the “heroism
and remarkable forgiveness” of DeShazer, who had died ten days earlier at his
home in Salem, Oregon, at age 95. “It is one of life’s safer bets that he is
restimg in peace,” the Journal concluded.
Any of us who served in World War II would
acknowledge DeShazer’s heroism in joining the legendary Jimmy Doolittle in that
first bombing raid over Japan. As the Journal noted, “The Doolittle bombing
raid was close to a suicide mission, a one-way trip to bring the war to the
Japanese homeland for the first time. Coming not long after Pearl Harbor and
before the Pacific island victories to come, the raid was a huge boost to
domestic morale.”
Though all of the 80 men who manned the 16 North
American B-25 bombers used in the raid were soldiers in the then Army Air Corps,
and subject to orders, their service on this special raid was entirely
voluntary. They were personally requested to serve by Doolittle, who in
addition to being a lieutenant colonel was a famous racing pilot from the
1930s. DeShazer said later that he was too much of a coward to refuse
Doolittle’s request.
The story of the famous raid has been told many
times in both print and film. The planes and crews took off from the aircraft
carrier USS Hornet in a turbulent sea and flew into history, bombing Tokyo and
other major cities. Corporal DeShazer, a bombardier aboard a B-25 called Bat
Out of Hell, dropped incendiary bombs on Nagoya before the plane ran out of fuel
and they were forced to bail out over a Japanese-held section of China. He was
soon captured and spent the next forty months as a war prisoner, beaten,
starved, and tortured by his Japanese captors. His pilot, Lieutenant William
Farrow, and engineer-gunner Sergeant Harold Spatz, were executed by firing
squad.
The same harsh punishments were doled out to
hundreds of other Allied soldiers and sailors captured in the early months of
the war. Some of them were killed or died from malnourishment and brutal
treatment, others barely survived to come home filled with hatred for those
enemy guards who had abused and taunted them. But DeShazer’s story had a
different outcome. That was the “remarkable forgiveness” noted by the
Journal.
DeShazer, amid the misery of imprisonment, turned
to religious teachings he had learned as a child. “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.”
This was his profound spiritual awakening that
would stay with him for life. Corporal DeShazer gained the strength to survive,
forgave his captors without reservations, and became determined to spread
Christian teachings to the people who had almost killed him.
Upon returning home, he enrolled at Seattle Pacific
College (now Seattle Pacific University) and received a bachelor’s degree in
biblical literature in 1948. In late December of that year, he arrived in Japan
with his wife Florence, also a graduate of Seattle Pacific and a fellow
missionary in the Free Methodist Church.. A few days later, he preached his
first sermon there, speaking to about 180 people at a church in a Tokyo suburb.
He and Florence eventually helped start 23 churches in Japan The DeShazers
would spend 30 years in Japan doing missionary work. Their five children
helped.
In 1950, they gained a surprising convert, a Naval
officer as honored in Japan as Doolittle was in the U.S. Captain Mitsuo
Fuchida, the Japanese naval flier who had led the Pearl Harbor attack and had
become a rice farmer after the war, came upon DeShazer’s tract.
“It was then that I met Jesus, and accepted him as
my personal savior,” 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.
DeShazer met several times with Fuchida, who died
in 1976.“I saw him just before he died,” DeShazer once told The Salem Statesman
Journal. “We shared in that good wonderful thing that Christ has done.”
Retiring to his native Oregon after their work in
Japan, Jake and Florence lived quietly in Salem until his passing.
The slight war damage inflicted by the Doolittle
raid did nothing to impair Japan’s warmaking capability. But it provoked the
Japanese assault on Midway, which turned out to be a disaster for them and
marked the beginning of American victories in the Pacific.
The more lasting victory, however, may have been
DeShazer’s rebirth and forgiveness in the midst of hellish conditions. No
wonder The Wall Street Journal called it “remarkable.”
From: Mature Living, Toledo, Ohio, October, 2008
