He Led the Attack on Pearl Harbor, but Then His Enemy Led Him to Jesus

ABOVE: CBN News spoke with author T. Martin Bennett about this amazing story on the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Click on the video to hear more about this remarkable true testimony.

Eighty-four years ago, on December 7, 1941, Japanese pilot Mitsuo Fuchida led the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that stunned Americans and catapulted the U.S. into World War II.

But years later, his life was transformed, partly by the testimony of an American who had been his enemy during the war. It was a man named Jacob DeShazer, who had been a prisoner of war in Japan.   

DeShazer hated the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, and in April 1942, he risked his life for revenge as a member of the famed "Doolittle Raiders," carrying out a daring daylight bombing raid on Tokyo and other cities.  

When DeShazer's plane ran out of fuel over Japanese-held territory, he was captured by Japan. For 40 months his captors starved, beat, and tortured him. While DeShazer was in prison he begged his captors for a Bible, and that's when he came to Christ.

"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," DeShazer recalled.

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After the war, DeShazer returned to Japan as a missionary, and that's when his life intersected with Mitsuo Fuchida.

And DeShazer wasn't the only Western Christian whose testimony helped to draw Fuchida to salvation through Jesus Christ.

The amazing story of Fuchida's conversion, and the two Americans who reached him with the Gospel, is the subject of a book titled Wounded Tiger by T. Martin Bennett.

BELOW: Doolittle Raider Jacob DeShazer Tells His Testimony of Salvation