From tragedy to miracle … 75 years later
Seventy-five years ago this Christmas season, on Dec. 20, 1943, 17 American civilians were brutally murdered by the Japanese military on a remote island in the Philippines. Eleven of them were American Baptist missionaries, whose only crime had been that they were involved in educational and medical ministries in that part of the world.
Following the invasion of the Philippines, in December of 1941, they had all fled to an isolated island hideout in a dense jungle valley, and named it, appropriately, Hopevale. Life had been primitive, but pleasant, there for the next two years, until the Japanese found them. Their executions quickly followed, the adults beheaded and three children bayoneted to death. Two of the group, missionaries James and Charma Covell, had actually served in a school in Japan until 1939. At that time, with the winds of war flaming red hot, they had shifted their ministry to the Philippines, and eventually sent their three children back to the States prior to the Japanese occupation.
Totally unknown at the time, the martyrdom of the Covells would ultimately have a profound, Godordained influence on the postwar conversion, and subsequent transformation, of one of Japan’s most celebrated war heroes.
Japanese leader at
Pearl Harbor
In October of 1941, two months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, one of the fastest-rising stars in the Imperial Navy’s aviation component, Mitsuo Fuchida, was promoted to the rank of commander. A few weeks later, on Dec. 7, 1941, Fuchida, from the cockpit of a Nakajima torpedo bomber, would lead and coordinate the surprise air attack on Hawaii. The Pearl Harbor raid inflicted great damage upon America’s Pacific Fleet and thrust our nation headlong into the second World War.
It was Fuchida, flying over the carnage at Pearl Harbor, who ordered the now infamous coded message “Tora! Tora! Tora!” be transmitted back to the attack forces’s flagship AKAGI. That communication signaled that complete surprise had been achieved. Almost overnight, he became a national hero and was awarded a personal audience with the emperor.
Over the course of the war, Fuchida would survive, while most of Japan’s pilots perished. He would once again be the leader for the daring and destructive air attack on Darwin, Australia, as well as the bold thrust against British bases located in Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka), both in early 1942. While recovering from an emergency shipboard appendectomy during the epic Battle of Midway, in June of 1942, both of his ankles were broken as a result of American bombs. Nevertheless, he survived yet again.
After a lengthy recuperation period, Fuchida served primarily as a staff officer for the rest of the war, rising to the rank of captain. In the middle of 1944, he was ordered from his duty station on the island of Tinian to Tokyo, just two weeks before an American invasion resulted in the deaths, either in combat or by suicide, of virtually every Japanese in uniform on the island. Once again, Fuchida had been spared from almost certain death.
In what turned out to be the last days of the war, Capt. Fuchida was attending a military conference in Hiroshima, when ordered by Navy headquarters to return at once to Tokyo. The very next day Hiroshima was leveled by the world’s first use of an atomic bomb. On the day following the attack, he was dispatched, along with an inspection team, to assess damage in the devastated city. Every member of that group soon succumbed to death due to radiation poisoning, while Fuchida alone survived, never even showing any symptoms.
Fuchida’s search for truth
After the war, disillusioned, bitter and even depressed, he turned his attention to raising his family and farming, among the devastated ruins of his homeland. All the while, deep in his spirit, he was searching for something more to life than the futile pursuit of war and bloodshed that he had experienced for most of his.
In 1947, two years after war’s end, Fuchida was angered when Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered him to testify at the trials of certain Japanese accused of war crimes.
He reasoned that all of the nations participating in the great conflict were equally guilty of atrocities, and that America was simply carrying out its own form of vengeance against Japan.
Seeking to bring evidence to the trials that America had also brutalized his own countrymen, he sought out a group of recently returned Japanese POWs, to determine what kind of treatment they had received while in the U.S. What he found out shocked him to the core. They had been neither tortured nor abused, but had been dealt with fairly. In fact, a young woman named Peggy Covell, a volunteer at their camp, had been especially gracious and kind to them. She had served them in their time of need, despite the fact that her parents had been brutally murdered by Japanese soldiers in the Philippines earlier in the war.
Fuchida now became a driven man, consumed with the desire to discover what could motivate someone like Peggy Covell to love her enemies. The truth is that Margaret, or “Peggy” as she was called, the oldest of the Covell children, was initially filled with anger and rage after hearing of her parents’ executions.
Then she received word from Filipino eyewitnesses of how her parents were granted a time of prayer before being beheaded.
She was certain that they were praying for those about to kill them, praying as Jesus had prayed on the Cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Ashamed of her hate-filled heart, she determined, with God’s help, to purposefully love those who had committed such evil against her and her family. Many Japanese POWs returned home, in awe of the kindness shown them by Peggy Covell.
Fuchida encounters DeShazer
A year later, in downtown Tokyo, Fuchida was handed a pamphlet entitled “I Was a Prisoner of Japan.” The piece of literature had been written by Jacob DeShazer, an American airman who had been part of the Doolittle Raid on Japan in April of 1942. DeShazer had been captured after his bomber had run out of fuel over Japanese occupied China. Of the five members of his crew, only he survived. Three were executed and one was slowly starved to death.
DeShazer, who was filled with hatred toward the Japanese, was imprisoned for 40 months, 34 of those in solitary confinement, before being liberated in the last days of the war. While a prisoner, a guard had miraculously smuggled an English Bible into the cell of the tortured, beaten and malnourished American airman. Devouring the words of Scripture in the three weeks that he was allowed to keep the Bible, he found freedom and life in the stark confines of an enemy cell.
DeShazer, the new Christian, returned to the States after the war, prepared for ministry at Seattle Pacific College, and returned to Japan as a missionary in 1948. He would serve his prior enemies for the next 30 years.
DeShazer’s booklet greatly intensified Fuchida’s search for truth. Soon he began earnestly reading the Bible. It wasn’t long before Capt. Fuchida, the once proud leader of the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor, came to faith in Christ.
In 1950 he met DeShazer for the first time. The two would often speak together at Christian meetings in the years to follow. Fuchida spent the rest on his life sharing how Christ had delivered him from his sins, made him a new creature, and given him meaning and purpose in life. The influence of his ministry was widespread, touching the lives of many in Japan, America and all across the world.
The Christian Gospel declares that Christ, through His death on the Cross, gives eternal life to all who believe in Him. The deaths of James and Charma Covell were used by God, in His amazing Providence, to bring everlasting life to Fuchida. Fuchida, in turn, devoted his remaining years, until his death in 1976, to spreading the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ. Remember the Covells, and the other Hopevale missionary martyrs, who gave their lives, in a time of war, in the service of their Savior … 75 years ago.