Corporal Jacob D. DeShazer

Jacob Daniel DeShazer was born on 15 November 1912 into a family of wheat farmers in West Stayton, Oregon and graduated from Madras Middle School in Madras, Oregon in 1931. It is said that on Sunday 7 December 1941, while peeling potatoes, DeShazer heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor over the radio. He became enraged, shouting: "Japan is going to pay for this!" His father was Jacob DeShazer and his mother Hulda Marie DeShazer (Arensmeier). Jacob Daniel DeShazer married Florence Faye (Matheny) DeShazer. The couple had 5 children.

Jake and Florence and their 5 children

After bombing Nagoya, Japan, during the Doolittle raid, crew 16a ttempted to reach a safe haven in China. Deshazer and the rest of the B-25 crew were forced to parachute into enemy territory over Ningbo, China when their B-25 ran out of fuel because of the extra distance it was forced to fly by early launch of the raid. DeShazer was injured in his fall into a cemetery and along with the rest of his crew, he was captured the very next day, 19 April 1942, by the Japanese. During his captivity, DeShazer was sent to Tokyo with the survivors of another Doolittle crew including Robert Hite, and was held in a series of P.O.W. (prisoner-of-war) camps both in Japan and China for 40 months – 34 of them in solitary confinement. He was severely beaten and malnourished while three of the crew were executed by a firing squad, and another died of slow starvation. DeShazer's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Emperor Hirohito. As the war came to an end, on 20 August 1945, DeShazer and the others in the camp at Beijing, China were finally released when American soldiers parachuted into the camp. 

During his captivity, DeShazer persuaded one of his guards to loan him a copy of the Bible. Although he only had possession of the Bible for three weeks, he saw its messages as the reason for his survival and resolved to become a devout Christian. His conversion included learning a few words of Japanese and treating his captors with respect, which resulted in the guards reacting in a similar fashion. After his release, DeShazer entered Seattle Pacific College, a Christian college associated with the Free Methodist denomination, and then Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, where he began studies to become a missionary, eventually to return to Japan with his wife, Florence, in 1948.

Left to right : DeShazer, Hite and Nielsen

DeShazer, the Doolittle Raider who bombed Nagoya, met Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, becoming close friends. (For That One Day: The Memoirs of Mitsuo Fuchida, Commander of the Attack on Pearl Harbor, translated by Douglas T. Shinsato and Tadanori Urabe.) Fuchida became a Christian in 1950 after reading a tract written about DeShazer titled, I Was a Prisoner of Japan, and spent the rest of his life as a missionary in Asia and the United States. On occasion, DeShazer and Fuchida preached together as Christian missionaries in Japan. In 1959, DeShazer moved to Nagoya to establish a Christian church in the city he had bombed.

Jake and Florence during 1948

DeShazer retired after 30 years of missionary service in Japan and went back to his home town in Salem, Oregon where he spent the last years of his life in an assisted living home with his wife, Florence. On 15 March 2008, DeShazer died in his sleep at the age of 95, leaving his wife and five children: Paul, John, Mark, Carol, and Ruth.

Article mainly taken from Wikipedia.