At 7:40am on Sunday, December 7, 1941 Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who had just turned 39 four days before, slid back the canopy of his Nakajima B5N2 torpedo bomber and fired a single dark blue flare, the signal for the 182 torpedo bombers, fighters, and dive bombers behind him to attack.  He banked west and led his group along the northwest coast of Oahu, adrenaline rushing through his system.  In his mind payback was coming for the Immigration Act of 1924, which prohibited Asian-Pacific people from immigrating to the United States.

The Japanese and the Chinese built their railroads and the Panama Canal.  Now they don’t want us.

At 7:53am, seeing no activity over Pearl Harbor, he ordered his radio man, Petty Officer 1st Class Norinobu Mizuki, to send the code words Tora! Tora! Tora! back to his carrier, Akagi, the flagship of Japanese 1st Air Fleet. Complete surprise had been achieved.

He later wrote, “Like a hurricane out of nowhere, my torpedo planes, dive bombers and fighters struck suddenly with indescribable fury.  As smoke began to billow and the proud battleships, one by one, started tilting, my heart was almost ablaze with joy. . . . It was the most thrilling exploit of my career.”

After the first wave of the attack, which did the more damage, Fuchida, his ordinance expended, remained over the harbor to assess the destruction, which was extensive.  At 8:50am the second wave of 170 Japanese planes arrived to continue the onslaught.

Thirty minutes later he returned with the planes of the second wave to the Akagi, one of six aircraft carriers in the battle group that had launched planes for the attack.  From the Japanese standpoint “Operation Z” was a huge success.  They had lost 29 aircraft and 64 personnel compared to U.S. losses of 21 ships, 188 aircraft, with another 159 damaged, and 2,403 lives.

Upon landing on the Akagi, Fuchida inspected the damage to his plane and counted 21 large flak holes.  More ominous, one of his mechanics later found a frayed elevator cable that held together by a single thread.  Had it snapped, his plane would have gone down.  In his own mind he was simply lucky.

Luck seemed to accompany him throughout the war.  In June, 1942 he was to have led the attack on Midway Island.  But six days before the battle he underwent an emergency appendectomy, which restricted him to bridge duties.  During the battle, while their decks were filled with planes about to take off, three of the four Japanese carriers present, including his own Akagi, were hit by 500-pound bombs from U.S. Dauntless Dive Bombers.  The secondary explosions from fuel and ordinance on the planes immediately doomed all three ships.

Flames blocked the exit from the bridge of the Akagi, forcing the officers to evacuate down a rope.  As Fuchida descended, another secondary explosion threw him to the deck, breaking both of his ankles.  He was dragged from the stricken ship and put aboard a destroyer.

Nearly all of the pilots preparing to take off from the Akagi were killed.  The remaining pilots Fuchida was to have led were returning from an attack on Midway Island.  With no place to land, they crashed into the sea after running out of fuel, and most of them were lost.

“I would have died,” he later said.  “I know I would have died.”

His injuries prevented him from further air combat missions for the duration of the war.  He became a staff officer under Vice Admiral Kakuji Kakuta on the island of Tinian, of the Marianas Islands group.  On July 10, 1944, two weeks before the American invasion of Tinian, he was ordered to Tokyo.  When it was obvious that America would take Tinian, Admiral Kakuta and all his staff officers chose seppuku, the samurai suicide ritual of disembowelment by sword.

“Again, the sword of death had missed me only by inches.  What does it mean?” he began to ponder.

Perhaps the most convincing proofs that he was being sheltered from death came near the war’s end.  After Okinawa fell in June, 1945, the now Captain Fuchida was ordered to Hiroshima to organize the aerial defenses for a final stand against the allies.  On the evening of August 5, he was abruptly ordered to attend a briefing 500 miles away.

As he ate breakfast in Yamato the next morning, he learned that everyone he’d been working with in Hiroshima was dead, along with many thousands of other Japanese, victims of the first atomic bomb attack in world history.  He was ordered to return to Hiroshima with a dozen other officers to assess the damage.

Soon after the inspection each of the officers who had accompanied Fuchida began to show strange signs of illness.  They walked lethargically and lost their appetites. They began losing their hair and their teeth started to fall out.  Twenty days after strolling through the bomb wreckage, the first member of the assessment team died of radiation poisoning.

“Like drowning men letting go of a lifeline, one by one, members of the team perished.”

The last man on his deathbed assured Captain Fuchida that he would be next.  But somehow, he never displayed any symptoms and was the only one of his party to survive.

A few weeks later, Captain Fuchida’s role in the war came full circle when he stood on the deck of USS Missouri battleship in Tokyo Bay on September 2, witnessing the formal surrender of Japan to the allies.  Utterly depressed, he returned to his hometown of Kashihara to help his wife raise their two children and undertake the family business of chicken farming.

“It was a rainy day in my life….Life had no taste or meaning….I had missed death so many times and for what?  What did it all mean?”

Because of his military significance, he was summoned to Tokyo in 1947 by General Douglas MacArthur to testify at Japanese war crimes trials, which infuriated him as little more than “victor’s justice.”  Before taking the stand, he set about collecting his own evidence, certain it would prove that the Americans were just as inhumane toward Japanese prisoners of war as were his countrymen, against whom he was compelled to testify.

He went to Uraga Harbor near Yokosuka to meet a group of 150 returning Japanese prisoners of war.  As the men walked toward him, Fuchida spotted a familiar face.  Kazuo Kanegasaki was his former flight engineer, whom he thought had perished during the Battle of Midway.  Kanegasaki informed Fuchida that he and his fellow prisoners were not tortured or abused by the Americans.  He went on to tell him about a young lady named Peggy Covell who had served them with the deepest love and respect at their POW camp in Colorado, despite the fact that her missionary parents had been killed by Japanese soldiers on the island of Panay in the Philippines.

“Why do you do this?” they asked her incredulously.

Gently, she replied in Japanese, “Because the Japanese army killed my parents.  But the Holy Spirit has washed away my hatred and has replaced it with love.”  The prisoners could not fathom such love and were haunted by her story even after returning to Japan, where her story was told over and over.

Peggy Covell grew up in Japan, where her parents served as missionary teachers in a middle school.  In 1939 they relocated to the Philippines for safety reasons, as Japan became more unstable.  She finished high school in Manila in 1940 and returned to the United States with her younger brother and sister, and then went to college.

When Manila was captured by Japanese troops on January 2, 1942 her parents, Jim and Charma, fled inland with the rest of their missionary team to a remote mountain hideout they christened “Hopevale.”  For nearly two years they lived peacefully among Filipino friends.  They held worship services in a deep ravine they dubbed “The Cathedral in the Glen.”  As many as 100 people attended their services, singing hymns, praying, and listening to the missionaries teach in the beautiful forest setting.

On Sunday morning, December 19, 1943 Japanese soldiers captured Hopevale, and condemned the missionaries to death.  All of them, even the children, were to be executed the next day.  On December 20^th they asked for time to pray together and read their Bibles.  Then, one by one, still singing hymns, they were escorted up the mountain and beheaded.  Their bodies were thrown into a hut and burned.

But what good is it to pray to a God who could not even save her parents?  Fuchida pondered.

“What did her parents pray?” he asked Kanegasaki.  Kanegasaki did not know.

For Fuchida forgiving one’s enemies was inexplicable.  The Bushido code he knew required revenge to restore honor.  The murderer of one’s parents would be a sworn enemy for life.  Why would anyone treat their enemies with love and forgiveness?

In the fall of 1948 he was called again to testify at additional Japanese war crimes trials.  As he got off the train at Shibuya Station, a western man handed him a missionary pamphlet entitled “I was a Prisoner in Japan.”  The author was Jacob DeShazer, a former U.S. Army Air Forces staff sergeant and bombardier, and one of the Doolittle Raiders whose carrier-launched B-25s bombed Japan in 1942. DeShazer’s plane ran out of fuel and crash-landed in China, where Japanese occupiers captured and imprisoned him.  In captivity DeShazer was repeatedly tortured and malnourished.  He witnessed the execution of three of his crew members.  The other, Lieutenant Bob Meder died of starvation in December, 1943.  Deep hatred ate away at his soul.  But before Lieutenant Meder died, he spoke to Sergeant DeShazer.  “Jake, Jesus Christ is the key to all of this.”

“I was gripped with a strange longing to examine the Christian’s Bible to see if I could find the secret,” wrote DeShazer.  “I begged my captors to get a Bible for me.  At last, in the month of May, 1944 a guard brought the book, but told me I could have it for only three weeks.  I eagerly began to read its pages.  Chapter after chapter gripped my heart….On June 8th, 1944, the words in Romans 10:9 stood out boldly before my eyes: ‘If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.’  In that very moment God gave me grace to confess my sins to Him, and He forgave me all my sins and saved me for Jesus’ sake….How my heart rejoiced in my newness of spiritual life, even though my body was suffering so terribly from the physical beatings and lack of food. But suddenly I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes, and that when I looked at the Japanese officers and guards who had starved and beaten me and my companions so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity.”

He began to learn Japanese and to treat his captors with respect.  The guards responded positively.  He resolved to someday bring the message of salvation to Japan if he could live through his captivity.

Ten days after the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, American soldiers parachuted into his POW camp in Beijing, China, freeing him and the rest of the prisoners.  DeShazer, who was close to death at the time, returned to America and attended Seattle Pacific College.  He then returned to Japan to preach the gospel.  He established a church in Nagoya, the same city he had bombed in 1942.

The examples of Peggy Covell and Jacob DeShazer created a desire in Fuchida to know more about the Christian God. In 1949 he purchased a Bible near the same Shibuya Station where he had received the pamphlet.  As he read the gospels, he began to understand the reason for the forgiveness that motivated Peggy and Jacob. He came across the passage in the gospel of Luke during Jesus’ crucifixion, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

On April 14, 1950, Mitsuo Fuchida accepted Christ as his Savior.  “Looking back, I can see now that the Lord had laid his hand upon me so that I might serve Him.”  He finally knew why he had survived the war.

The next month he went to Jacob DeShazer’s home in Nagoya and knocked on the door.  “I have desired to meet you, Mr. DeShazer,” he said.  “My name is Mitsuo Fuchida.”

“Come in, come in,” DeShazer answered.  The former enemies embraced as brothers in Christ and became fast friends.  For many years they toured together as evangelists, telling all who would hear about the saving message of Jesus Christ.

In his autobiography, From Pearl Harbor to Calvary (1959), he wrote, “I remember the thrill that was mine when, in one of my first evangelistic meetings, I led my first soul to Christ in America.  And he was one of my own countrymen.”

Mitsuo Fuchida lived in the United States for most of the remainder of his life but never became an American citizen.  He died of complications from diabetes in Kashiwara, Japan on May 30, 1976 at the age of 73.

In the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, the story of the Pearl Harbor attack, he was portrayed by Japanese actor Takahiro Tamura.