Jacob DeShazer RIP

Kyt · Apr 24, 2008

Jacob DeShazer | Times Online Obituary

After enduring more than three years of brutality and privation as a prisoner of war of the Japanese when his bomber was shot down over occupied China in 1942, Jacob DeShazer became a devout Christian and devoted most of the rest of his life to missionary work in Japan.

DeShazer had been the bomb aimer of one of the 16 US Army Air Force B25 bombers led by James Doolittle that were launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet to make America’s first retaliatory air raid on Japan after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

The range was far too great for them to be able to return to the carrier, and the aim was that they should land in Chinese territory after dropping their bombs. Though the raid did not inflict much damage (and all the aircraft were lost when they ran out of fuel), it was a great boost to American morale after four months of seemingly unanswerable Japanese victories. And though derided by the Imperial high command at the time as a pinprick, it was a warning to the Japanese that their homeland was not beyond the range of American retribution.

Jacob Daniel DeShazer was born in Oregon in 1912, the son of a minister and farmer who died when he was young. He was educated at Madras High School in the state, after which he was a farmhand for nine years before enlisting in the US Army Air Corps, as it then was, in 1940.

After Pearl Harbor he volunteered for the mission planned by Doolittle to hit back at Japan, and flew in the bomber Bat Out Of Hell, the last of the B25s to be launched from the Hornet against Tokyo and other Japanese targets on April 18, 1942.

Bat Out Of Hell bombed an oil refinery at Nagoya, 150 miles to the west of Tokyo, and carried on to China, but ran out of fuel over a Japanese occupied part of the country before it could locate a friendly airfield. Baling out with the rest of the crew, DeShazer was soon captured.

For the next three years he and others of the airmen of the Doolittle raid who had survived and fallen into Japanese hands endured brutal treatment at the hands of their captors, as well as malnutrition and long periods of solitary confinement. Three were executed by the Japanese and another died of starvation.

With other crew members DeShazer was released some days after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, bringing the war in the Far East to an end. (Doolittle, who had not been captured, returned to the US and became one of the war’s great air commanders.)

During his 40 months in oppressive captivity DeShazer had, however, been permitted a Bible. Daily perusal of this sustained him in his privation, and, as he was later to record in a religious tract, I Was a Prisoner of Japan (1950), enabled him to view his captors in compassionate terms as being men from whom the Christian message was hidden.

On his return to America he took a degree in divinity at Seattle Pacific College, where he met his wife, Florence. In 1948 the couple went to Japan, with their young baby, as Methodist missionaries. There, over the next 30 years of their evangelical mission, the pair preached a gospel of forgiveness, which came to the ears of, among others, the naval airman Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fuchida converted to Christianity in 1950 after reading I Was a Prisoner of Japan, and he and DeShazer were united both in friendship and in Christian mission throughout Japan.

In 1958 DeShazer went back to the US to take a master’s degree in divinity at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky. The following year he returned to Japan and founded a church in Nagoya. Overall he helped to found 23 churches in Japan. In final retirement DeShazer and his wife lived in Sales, Oregon, where he died.

He is survived by his wife and by three sons and two daughters.

Jacob DeShazer, wartime bomb aimer and missionary, was born on November 15, 1912. He died on March 15, 2008, aged 95
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Antipodean Andy · Apr 24, 2008

Another goblet to be turned upside down. RIP.

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