"From Pearl Harbor to Calvary," by Mitsuo Fuchida, Commander Who Led the Pearl Harbor Air Attack
Since BLI, the publisher, tells it best about themselves, I will let them:
"Never underestimate the power of the printed page. It has a way of penetrating into minds and hearts as nothing else can! For half a century, Bible Literature International has been the leading supplier of evangelical literature to missionaries and nationals on the world's front lines of evangelism. As a result, many amazing testimonies of how the 'quiet miracle' of literature has transformed lives have filtered back to BLI's office in Columbus, Ohio. The story you are about to read is a thrilling classic...the actual testimony of Mitsuo Fuchida, the commander of the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor...Along with this testimony, we have included the actual wording of the BLI tract, 'I WAS A PRISONER OF WAR', by Jacob DeShazer, which led to Fuchida's conversion, and later, to his becoming Japan's most outstanding Christian evangelist."--J.M. Falkenberg, President, Bible Literature International. To order this amazing two-testimony broadside, write: Bible Literature International, Box 477, Columbus, Ohio 43216.
We do hope this order address is still current, as these tandem testimonies tell the most remarkable, dramatic story, perhaps, of World War II's Pacific Theatre.
Jacob DeShazer, a young American serviceman, heard the news of the Pearl Harbor attack at his army base in California where he was peeling potatoes in loathed but inescapable KP duty, and his first impulse was to fling a spud against the wall and shout for revenge.
The news hit him so hard in the gut he instantly and passionately hated the Japanese people for their treacherous, devastating attack. DeShazer gets his chance to wreak revenge. He takes part in the Jimmy Doolittle surprise air raid on Tokyo as a bombadier.
The plane he is in runs out of gas, however, and he and others are forced to parachute down somewhere in China. Some vanish forever in the mountains as MIA's, but DeShazer is captured by the Japanese. The Japanese prison Jacob DeShazer and other American POWS were thrown into during the war is a brutal place, with torture added to the starvation. Formerly strong, muscled men are reduced to pitiful, living skeletons. DeShazer watches his room-mate die from the effects of starvation when he suffers a fatal heart attack.
Transformed by reading I Corinthians 13, the Bible's Love Chapter, Jacob DeShazer's almost insane hate for the torturing Japanese prison guards is replaced with love. When the war is over, DeShazer returns to the States to go to school at Seattle Pacific College.
After the war, Mitsuo Fuchida, bitter over Japan's humiliating defeat and unconditional surrender, leaves professional army life and goes back to the family farm and buries his life there for a time in menial drudgery, while his soul churns with misery and torment of a once highly successful life in the military gone nowhere.
After the war, Mitsuo Fuchida, bitter over Japan's humiliating defeat and unconditional surrender, leaves professional army life and goes back to the family farm and buries his life there for a time in menial drudgery, while his soul churns with misery and torment of a once highly successful life in the military gone nowhere.
Called by the Lord to go back to Japan with the Gospel, DeShazer drops his studies and obeys. One day he is sharing his life story in a pamphlet entitled, "I Was a Prisoner of War," at the busy Shibuya train station in Tokyo when Mitsuo Fuchida, the infamous commander of the Pearl Harbor attack squadron of fighter planes that took thousands of American lives and nearly wiped out America's Navy, passed by.
Fuchida, leaving his village and farm to return to Tokyo to testify at one of the hearings held by General MacArthur for dealing with Japanese war crimes, takes the pamphlet Jacob DeShazer (who does not know Mitsuo Fuchida by sight and has only heard of him) hands to him.
When he later reads it, the irresistable power of Christ's love in Jacob DeShazer's story transforms him radically into a believer in Jesus Christ.
He too, like his former enemy Jacob DeShazer, seeks forgiveness and reconciliation, receives both from the Lord, and becomes an evangelist sharing the grace and Gospel of Jesus Christ to a nation where the name of Mitsuo Fuchida is still a household fixture, whether revered or regretted for his epochal role in bringing to America a tragedy that some historians say today looked like a victory but effectively destroyed Japan's bid for world power.
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