The bombing of Japan by the Doolittle Raiders on April 18, 1942 -- featured in the closing minutes of the movie Pearl Harbor -- was only the beginning of an incredible saga that gives testimony to the power of God's love in a world of men determined to hate. And while the Raiders in the movie waged a fierce gun battle with the Japanese, in the "real story" none of the eight captured men (from two planes) fired a single shot after ditching their aircraft in Japanese-held China. Unsure of the loyalties among the people they met, they didn't want to mistakenly shoot nationalist Chinese soldiers or civilians.

Almost without preamble, the men found themselves in the hands of theJapanese. An intense period of interrogation, torture, extended isolation and despair followed. Three -- both pilots and a rear gunner -- were executed by firing squad; another died of slow starvation. Only four lived through it, and only one determined to return, Lord willing. First he had come with bombs; now he would come back again -- armed with the love of Christ for his "enemies."

Jacob D. "Jake" DeShazer -- an exceedingly charming 88-year-old with an engaging smile and striking blue eyes -- currently resides with his wife of 55 years, Florence, in his home state of Oregon. But between 1942 and 1945, this gentle patriot endured 40 months of brutality and deprivation, 36 of them in solitary confinement. The weight on his 5-foot-6-inch frame dropped from 160 to 128 pounds; at times his body was covered with boils. "The only feeling I harbored was that of hatred, bitter hatred," he recalls.

Given access to a Bible for three short weeks in 1944, DeShazer experienced a divine transformation. He made peace with Christ in his lonely prison cell, returning to his Christian roots and thereby answering his mother's prayers that his life be spared -- both for now, and for eternity. And while his conditions didn't change, his heart did.

Upon his release from captivity at the close of the war, DeShazer revealed that God had called him to return to Japan -- taking the love of Christ to that defeated, disillusioned people. In obedience to God, DeShazer, his wife and the first of their five children arrived in Yokohama on Dec. 28, 1948, to begin 30 years of service as Free Methodist missionaries.

Many thousands of Japanese responded to their former prisoner's invitation to receive Christ as Savior; perhaps most notable among them was Mitsuo Fuchida -- commander of the Japanese air fleet that devastated Pearl Harbor, and made famous in the movie Tora, Tora, Tora. Fuchida's conversion came as a direct result of his reading "I Was a Prisoner of Japan," a tract written by DeShazer, translated into Japanese and widely distributed by Bible League International (BLI). Fuchida's subsequent intensive study of the Bible and discovery of the truth was quite similar to DeShazer's own conversion experience, and the two men spent many years evangelizing together in Japan and around the world.

Train Up a Child ...
DeShazer's formative years were spent in Madras, OR, where he and his family faithfully attended the local Free Methodist church. But during his high school years, he slowly drifted from his Christian moorings.

Perhaps that's why, as his parachute carried him down toward a very uncertain future on that foggy night in 1942, DeShazer thought it would be "dishonest" to pray. So he didn't. (He was not without prayer cover, however. At that very hour, his mother awakened suddenly with a strange feeling of being dropped down through the air. She prayed, in great distress, until the burden was gone and sleep returned. She had absolutely no knowledge at the time -- nor did most of the United States -- of the Doolittle Raid or her son's participation in it.)

Later, DeShazer recalls, before fellow captive Lt. Robert J. Meder died of malnutrition in December 1943, he said, "Jake, Jesus Christ is the key to all of this."

DeShazer continues, "And I thought, so what does that have to do with it? Jesus Christ was a long time ago. I couldn't understand it. But when I became a Christian, I knew what Meder was talking about."

Life Sentence: Solitary Confinement
Bombardier Cpl. DeShazer and the other fliers from his plane (pilot Lt. William Farrow, co-pilot Lt. Robert L. Hite, navigator Lt. George Barr and engineer/gunner Harold A. Spatz) were beaten and interrogated in Nanking, then flown to Tokyo. There they learned of the three other captives, survivors from plane No. 6: pilot Lt. Dean E. Hallmark, co-pilot Meder and navigator Lt. Chase J. Nielsen. (Their two other crewmen had drowned when they crash-landed off the coast of China.)

Mistreatment was constant. On one occasion, DeShazer was forced to kneel and was beaten severely during an inquisition. Nielsen was handcuffed and hung for about eight hours from a peg on the wall with his toes barely touching the floor. Others were stretched out on boards with towels over their faces. Water was poured over them repeatedly, nearly suffocating them.

After two months, they were transferred to "Bridge House" in Shanghai, back on mainland China. Already in poor physical condition from beatings and a lack of food, DeShazer and his compatriots were thrown into a 12-by-15-foot cell with 15 Chinese prisoners, two of them women. The eight men received only a cup of boiled rice soup for breakfast each day, 4 ounces of bread for lunch and dinner and approximately 2 quarts of water to share among them. The room was so small the entire group couldn't even lie down at one time.

Meanwhile, the Japanese military leadership couldn't agree about what to do with the captured Raiders. One group wanted them treated like other POWs; the other considered them "war criminals" and wanted them immediately tried and executed. A compromise was reached (no one knows the specific rationale behind it), and three of the captives (Farrow, Hallmark and Spatz) were executed on Oct. 15, 1942. The others were sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement -- though none of this was officially communicated to the eight men.

Following 70 days in the horrific environment of Bridge House, a mock trial was held and the men were transferred to another Shanghai prison where they were placed in 5-by-8-foot cells with small slits in the doors. They were not allowed to speak out loud except to say "hello" to each other when they cleaned their cells. Their first inkling that something had happened to three of their members was when they failed to show up during these times. Later, they learned of the executions from one of their guards.

They had no books, no paper and pencils, no news from outside. The summers were severely hot, the winters bitterly cold. DeShazer became increasingly fearful of physical disease and of losing his mental capabilities.

Heaven Comes Down
When they were transferred to Nanking in 1943, things got better -- although this is where Meder eventually died.

DeShazer remembers, "One day they called us out of our prison cells, and we didn't know whether we were going to be shot, or what was going to happen -- they were always promising to execute us. But instead, they had an interpreter who told us that the emperor of Japan had written a letter saying he was ashamed at the way they'd been treating us prisoners of war ... and they should treat us better. So they gave us bread to eat with our rotten potato peel soup."

They also promised to give the men some books and a Bible, but DeShazer -- who had been doing a lot of thinking and was most anxious to get his hands on a Bible -- was the lowest-ranking of the group and was forced to wait. When his turn finally came, he could only keep the coveted volume for three weeks.

"When I got that Bible," he recalls, "I thought about how the Christians believed the Bible -- believed it was the Word of God. And God didn't lie. And so I read that Bible to find evidence that it is the Word of God. And right away I found the evidence."

In his dimly lit cell, DeShazer read the entire Bible several times through and the Prophets six times. He spent many hours tracing prophecies to their fulfillment and memorizing the Sermon on the Mount, the Epistle of 1 John and other verses that spoke to his quickening heart.

He must have gotten the Bible again later because he remembers that on June 8, 1944, he received assurance of his salvation when his eyes fell once again on Romans 10:9. "Boy, that hit me! It was the best news I'd ever heard in my life. There are just two things: you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart. And I did! I believed at that time -- and I do yet -- it's God's Word. I believe heaven came down there in that prison cell."

DeShazer recalls one opportunity he was given as a new convert to "try out" the principles of Scripture, in particular the command to love your enemies. "I was supposed to put the food into the cells, and when I finished the job, the guard said, 'get back in your prison cell and hurry up!' He slapped me on the back and was kicking me, and I was trying to get away from him as fast as I could. But I had to pull my shoes off before I could go into the cell and I got one foot inside when he slammed the door and caught my other foot in the door jamb. And he was kicking my foot with his big old shoes. I didn't know what to do at first -- I'd been in solitary confinement and my thinking was so slow. Finally I pushed back on the door real hard, got my foot free and got in.
"The first thing I thought was He's too mean! Jesus doesn't expect us to love those real mean ones. But Jesus says in the Scripture I'd memorized, 'love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.' So the next morning, I was all ready for that guard and I wanted to show him I didn't have any more resentment or bitterness about his treatment. I could tell by the way he was walking who he was. And when he came by, I went up to that little slit in the door and I smiled and said, 'Good morning!' in Japanese."

DeShazer kept up his efforts at kindness and recalls what happened with a chuckle. "About the sixth day after he'd kicked me and been so mean, he slid back the little door where we got our food and handed me in a boiled sweet potato. So I thought, boy, this way really works!"

During the final months of their captivity, in Peking, the men were in poor conditions once again. Each prisoner had to sit all day on a small "bench" -- essentially a 2-by-4 about 8 inches long -- facing the rear wall of his cell.
It was here, on Aug. 10, 1945, that DeShazer heard the Lord audibly directing him to pray for peace -- without ceasing. He did so, until precisely 2:30 p.m., when he sensed he was to stop. Unknown to him and his comrades, atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki within the previous five days, and the emperor's surrender would be broadcast on Aug. 15. God was at work. The war was over. The captives were set free.

Return to the Land of the Rising Sun
Less than a month later, DeShazer was attending Seattle Pacific University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in three years, met and married Florence Matheny of Toddville, IA, and had the first of his five children.
The DeShazers' arrival in Yokohama on Dec. 28, 1948, was greeted with much curiosity and interest from the Japanese. DeShazer recalls their eager questioning: "What happened to you? Why did you come back? Didn't they hit you and spit on you and treat you mean? Why do you want to come back here? ... And I started to tell them all about Jesus."

And tell them he did! After their emperor disavowed his divinity in 1946, DeShazer found the Japanese eager to learn about -- and respond to -- the God of Christianity. It is estimated that there were some 30,000 conversions during DeShazer's first year in Japan -- as many as 10,000 during one 10-day campaign. Included were many of DeShazer's former prison guards, even the one who had delivered the Bible to the prisoners in Nanking.

In his second year, greatly burdened for revival, DeShazer undertook a 40-day fast. The miraculous conversion of Fuchida took place at this time. Soon thereafter, DeShazer and his longtime interpreter Kaneo Oda, president of Osaka Christian College, traveled extensively as revival spread through the nation. During 16 days of meetings in coal mines on the island of Kyushu, nearly 4,000 decisions were recorded.

In 1959, just returned from their first furlough and at the request of Japanese Christians, the DeShazers settled in Nagoya (where his bombs had fallen 17 years earlier). English classes and Florence's flannel-board presentations attracted young and old alike, and a church was born.

The DeShazers started several Free Methodist churches during their years in Japan, and Jake's humble-yet-powerful testimony helped strengthen and expand many more.

War and Remembrance
Every year on April 18, the surviving Doolittle Raiders gather somewhere in the United States for a reunion. Eighty individually engraved silver goblets line the table. Those of the men who have died are turned over; those of the living are turned up. (There were only 25 remaining as of June 2001, and DeShazer was one month shy of being the oldest.) A toast is given "to those who have gone." DeShazer drinks his with water, but his story is really one of blood -- the blood of war, and the blood of Christ: that precious blood that covers every sin, enables the forgiving of enemies, sustains hope, brings love. ... And that is why the true story of Jacob DeShazer -- the Doolittle Raider who traded bombs for Bibles -- will always be better than anything Hollywood could devise.