Fate entwines lives since Pearl attack, Doolittle raid

By Rod Ohira
Advertiser Staff Writer

By the time Dick Hamada awoke on Dec. 7, 1941, to the sounds of explosions and aircraft flying over his Mo'ili'ili home, an ecstatic Capt. Mitsuo Fuchida was assessing the damage from the sky as he led the attack on Pearl Harbor. At an Army camp in California, Cpl. Jacob DeShazer heard the stunning radio announcement about the bombing and swore revenge.

Robert Hite, Jacob DeShazer, Dick Hamada and Chase Nielsen reunited in Honolulu for tomorrow's world premiere of "Pearl Harbor." Dick Hamada

DeShazer was one of four "Doolittle Raiders" tortured and beaten for 40 months as war captives after the April 18, 1942 bombing raid on Japan that exacted revenge for Pearl Harbor and boosted America's morale. Hamada was part of a special six-man unit that negotiated the release of DeShazer and the others.

DeShazer became a minister after the war and spent 30 years in Japan.

His story inspired Fuchida, the squadron leader of the attack on Pearl Harbor, to convert to Christianity and become a Presbyterian minister.

"It was destiny," said Hamada, a 79-year-old Kalihi Valley resident who attended last weekend's "Doolittle Raiders" reunion in Fresno, Calif., where he was reunited with three of the four prisoners he helped rescue 56 years ago. "The Good Man had to have planned it for it to have worked out the way it did."

Hamada, who once fought alongside native Kachin Rangers in the jungles of Burma, was part of the Office of Strategic Services team that parachuted into Beijing to negotiate the release of prisoners of war in the days between the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Japan's official declaration of surrender. His wartime contribution is distinguished by two Bronze Stars.

"It was supposed to be voluntary, but the word 'no' was removed from the dictionary when you joined OSS," Hamada said of the "Magpie Mission." "We were given money to bribe people for information. But I never got to use mine."

The group, lead by Maj. Ray Nichol, was surrounded by Japanese soldiers when they landed on the airfield on Aug. 17, 1945. "They were more shocked than anything," Hamada said, recalling that shots had been fired at the Americans while they were coming down.

With the help of the Swiss consul in Beijing, Nichol convinced the Japanese that his mission was humanitarian and he was not seeking their surrender. The Japanese released 300 British, French, Australian and American prisoners two days later. But Nichol was not finished.

He had learned from sources in Beijing that four Doolittle Raiders were secretly being held and demanded their release.

In Carroll V. Glines' 1966 novel "Four Came Home," eyewitness Hilaire du Berrier notes: "The Japanese were obviously stunned. Apparently they had believed that no one but themselves knew they were in Peking."

Minutes later came the order to free DeShazer, Robert L. Hite, Chase J. Nielsen and George Barr. They were among eight men from two bombers captured on the China coast after the bombing raid on Japan. Three of the eight were executed as war criminals in October 1942 and another died of beriberi and dysentery in December 1943.

Until their rescue, no one except the Japanese knew what had happened to the eight men. Lt. Col. James Doolittle had accounted for everyone else by May 1, 1942. He knew that three of the 80 Raiders were dead; that one Mitchell B-25 bomber had landed in Russia, where the crew was interned; and that everyone else was safe.

"We were sentenced to life in prison, and they were never going to release us," said Nielsen, an 84-year-old retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, in a telephone interview from his home in Brigham City, Utah. "The Japanese considered us war criminals, not prisoners of war.

"When we bombed Japan, it showed they were not invincible. They lost face."

The Raiders endured torture, malnutrition and solitary confinement during their captivity. A request, however, was eventually granted and it changed the life of one man.

When he was finally given a Bible to read in May 1944, DeShazer was told he could keep it for only three weeks. He read through it several times, memorizing Old Testament passages, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Epistle of John.

DeShazer found in Jesus' words what he needed to do: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them, which despitefully use you."

After the war, DeShazer attended Seattle Pacific College and returned to Japan in 1948 as a missionary, remaining there until his retirement in 1978. His testimony, "I Was a Prisoner of the Japanese," is of a man who learned to forgive his enemies.

DeShazer was the bombardier aboard "Bat Out of Hell," the last

B-25 to take off from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. His plane had bombed Nagoya, where he established a church in 1959.

Fuchida, meanwhile, was an unhappy man in 1948, disillusioned and frustrated with life, when he received a Bible Literature International (formerly The Bible Mediation League) pamphlet at a train station in Tokyo. "What I read was the fascinating episode which eventually changed my life," Fuchida said of DeShazer's story in his 1970 "From Pearl Harbor to Calvary" testimony.

Fuchida and DeShazer met in Osaka in 1948, two years before Fuchida was baptized.

The former fighter pilot, who died in May 1976, went on to spread his message in the United States as well as Japan.

"I would give anything to retract my actions ... at Pearl Harbor, but it is impossible," his testimony says. "Instead, I now work at striking the death-blow to the basic hatred which infests the human heart and causes such tragedies."

Fuchida visited Hawai'i many times after the war. He appeared with the Rev. Billy Graham and the late Rev. Abraham Akaka at an International Christian Leadership forum here marking the 25th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.

DeShazer, 88, and his wife, Florence, live in Oregon and are members of the Salem Free Methodist Church.

He is in Hawai'i for tomorrow's premiere of the movie "Pearl Harbor" and reportedly will be speaking to several church groups.

Sixteen other Doolittle Raiders are also here for the premiere, including Hite, 81, and Nielsen.

Hite, who lives in Camden, Ark., became a hotel operator after retiring from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel. Barr died in 1967.

Correction: Chase J. Nielsen was among the Doolittle Raiders rescued in Peking. His name was spelled incorrectly in a previous version of this story.