SALEM, OREGON (ANS) -- The World War Two 'Doolittle' bombing raid of April 18, 1942 was close to a suicide mission, being a one-way trip to bring the war to the Japanese homeland for the first time, says a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) opinion piece.

Coming not long after Pearl Harbor and before the Pacific island victories to come, the raid was a huge boost to domestic morale, the WSJ says.

Jacob DeShazer

Corporal Jacob DeShazer was one of five crewmen on Bat Out of Hell, a B-25 aircraft that took off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, dropped incendiary bombs over Nagoya, and then flew on to Japanese-occupied China, where the crew was forced to bail out. 

DeShazer was taken prisoner, and was starved, beaten and tortured by his Japanese captors.

According to the WSJ, for 34 of his 40 months in captivity, he was kept in solitary confinement. His pilot (Lieutenant William Farrow) and engineer-gunner (Sergeant Harold Spatz) were killed by firing squad. But DeShazer survived the war, was liberated after V-J Day in August 1945, and went on to get a degree in Biblical literature from Seattle Pacific College (now Seattle Pacific University). In 1948, he returned as a Christian missionary to the country that had nearly killed him, and he would continue his ministry in Japan for 30 years.

Richard Goldstein, writing in the New York Times, says 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, Oregon. He was 95. His death was announced by his wife, Florence.

Goldstein writes that 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 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.

Goldstein says that 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.

He writes: "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 most of their time in solitary confinement -- until their liberation a few days after Japan’s surrender in August 1945."

Amid his misery, says Goldstein, 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, Goldstein writes.

“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.”

Corporal DeShazer gained the strength to survive, and he became determined to spread Christian teachings to his enemy, Goldstein says.

Upon returning home, DeShazer 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, Goldstein says.

DeShazer (right) and Fuchida

Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese naval flier who had led the Pearl Harbor 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 savior,” 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.

Goldstein says that 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 Harbor.”

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.”

The Associated Pres (AP) also reports on DeShazser's passing.

The AP says he died Saturday at his home in Salem. Ruth Kutrakun, the youngest of DeShazer's children, confirmed the death.

After spending 40 months as a prisoner of war following the raid, DeShazer returned to Japan intent on forgiving his former captors and converting them to Christianity. Over 30 years, he helped start 23 churches in Japan, the AP reports.

Born Nov. 15, 1912, in Madras to a wheat-farming family, DeShazer graduated from Madras High School in 1931. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps at 27, two years before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. A month after the attack, he volunteered for a secret mission. He was the bombardier aboard the "Bat Out of Hell," one of 16 bombers that launched a surprise attack on Tokyo and other Japanese targets on April 18, 1942.

DeShazer's plane dropped bombs on a Nagoya, Japan, oil refinery before heading toward the safety of China.

But when the fuel depleted, the crew bailed out, parachuting into a dark, foggy night, the AP stated. Some of the raiders died. Others made it to safety that night. But DeShazer was among those the Japanese captured and sentenced to life in prison.

The AP story says that after suffering months of torture and hunger, a prison guard handed him a Bible. Even though he'd been raised in a Christian home, he said he had not embraced the faith until he read that prison Bible. He vowed that if he ever was freed, he would share what he learned with the Japanese.

DeShazer's captors freed him in August 1945, 10 days after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He returned to the United States, where he attended a Christian university.

The AP says DeShazer met Florence Matheny there and the two married in 1946. After he graduated in 1948, the couple moved to Japan as Free Methodist missionaries, where they helped establish churches throughout the country, the AP says.

He later told of his experiences in a 1950 biography, "The Amazing Story of Sgt. Jacob DeShazer" by C. Hoyt Watson, first published by Light and Life Press.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sons Mark, of Winston, Oregon; John, of Coos Bay, Oregon; 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.

The veterans of World War II are now at that age where they are dying ever more frequently, and their deaths should be an occasion to remember their achievement and sacrifice, the Wall Street Journal stated.

** Michael Ireland, Chief Correspondent of ANS, is an international British freelance journalist who was formerly a reporter with a London newspaper and has been a frequent contributor to UCB Europe, a British Christian radio station. Michael's involvement with ASSIST News Service is a sponsored ministry department -- Michael Ireland Media Missionary (MIMM) -- of ACT International at: Artists in Christian Testimony (ACT) International.