They were sworn enemies but ended up as brothers in Christ spreading the message of love.
In a twist of fate, the lives of two mortal World War II enemies intersected: Japanese pilot Mitsuo Fuchida—the leader of the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941—and Jacob DeShazer—a bombardier of one of the U.S. planes that carried out a bombing raid on Japan in April 1942 to avenge Pearl Harbor.
CBN News turned back the pages of time last week to focus on these two military warriors turned soldiers of Christ.
DeShazer was among the U.S. airmen who carried out the bombing raid that brought the war home to Japan for the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, according to a New York Times obituary following DeShazer's death on March 15, 2008 at the age of 95.
DeShazer's plane dropped bombs on Japanese military targets but it ran out of fuel before it could return to the carrier USS Hornet, forcing DeShazer and four other crewmen to parachute over Japanese-occupied territory in China where they were quickly captured.
The U.S. crewmen were tortured at prisons in Japan until their liberation a few days after Japan's surrender in August 1945.
While in prison, DeShazer had one source of solace—a Bible that a prison guard lent him. Reading the Bible gave him "new spiritual eyes" that changed his "bitter hatred" for the Japanese enemy "to loving pity," he recalled in "I Was a Prisoner of Japan," a religious tract he wrote in 1950.
"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," he wrote.
After regaining his freedom, DeShazer vowed to become a missionary and spread God's Word to Japan.
He did become a missionary after going to college and receiving a bachelor's degree in biblical literature. He went to Japan to spread God's Word in 1950 and gained a remarkable convert—Fuchida, the Japanese pilot who led the Pearl Harbor attack, who miraculously came to know Jesus Christ through a pamphlet handed to him while leaving a train in Tokyo, according to Fuchida's own testimony of salvation titled "From Pearl Harbor to Calvary."
The pamphlet was written by DeShazer, which eventually changed Fuchida's life.
DeShazer's story "was something I could not explain," Fuchida wrote. "The peaceful motivation I had read about was exactly what I was seeking. Since the American had found it in the Bible, I decided to purchase one myself, despite my traditionally Buddhist heritage."
Reading the Bible, Fuchida said he was particularly touched by what was written in Luke 23:34, the prayer of Jesus Christ at His death: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."
"I was impressed that I was certainly one of those for whom He had prayed. The many men I had killed had been slaughtered in the name of patriotism, for I did not understand the love which Christ wishes to implant within every heart," he wrote.
"I would give anything to retract my actions of twenty-nine years ago at Pearl Harbor, but it is impossible. Instead, I now work at striking the death-blow to the basic hatred which infests the human heart and causes such tragedies. And that hatred cannot be uprooted without assistance from Jesus Christ," Fuchida said.
The Japanese warrior eventually became an evangelist, travelling across Japan and the rest of Asia introducing others to Christ until his death in 1976.
