Biography of Mitsuo Fuchida
From Leading the Pearl Harbor Attack to Leading the Lost to Jesus
Feb 19, 2009 Ronald G Falconberry
Mitsuo Fuchida was born on December 3,1902, in Japan and enrolled in the Naval Academy in 1921 at the age of eighteen. Graduating three years later, he joined the Japanese Naval Air Force and gained valuable combat experience during Japan's expansion into China during the 1930s. Over a period of fifteen years, Fuchida logged over 10,000 hours of flight time most of which was as an aircraft carrier pilot.
Fuchida in Action During World War II
As relations between Japan and the United States worsened, Japanese military leaders began planning an attack on U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor and Fuchida was selected to lead the air attack because of his experience. On December 7, 1941, Commander Fuchida was among the first wave of aircraft launched at 6:00 a.m. and began the attack on the United States naval fleet before 8:00. For three hours, Fuchida directed fifty level bombers on their assignments and, later, climbed to a higher altitude to assess the damage done and inform his commanders.
Fuchida's role in the successful attack made him a national hero in Japan and he even had an audience with Emperor Hirohito. In February, 1942, Fuchida led the first of two waves of aerial attacks on Darwin, Australia and in April he led several attacks against British military forces on the island of Ceylon.
An emergency appendectomy kept Fuchida out of action during the Battle of Midway, on June 6, 1942. Afterward, he served as a staff officer and by the end of the war was the Imperial Navy's Air Operations Officer. In early August 1945, he was in Hiroshima for a week-long meeting with the Army but was called away on June 5, the day before the atomic bomb destroyed the city.
Fuchida's Disillusionment After the War
Once the war ended, Mitsuo Fuchida returned to his home village near Osaka and became a farmer. In From Pearl Harbor to Calvary, Fuchida wrote that he was very discouraged and had become "more and more unhappy, especially when the war crime trials opened in Tokyo." He was summoned by General Douglas McArthur to testify at the trials on several occasions.
While getting off a train at Tokyo's Shibuya Station one day in 1950, an American handed Fuchida a pamphlet titled "I Was A Prisoner of Japan." Fuchida took the pamphlet since the war crime trials were currently exploring atrocities against prisoners.
The document's author, Jacob Daniel DeShazer, had been on the 1942 Doolittle Raid and was captured in China after he parachuted from his plane. In spite of 40 months of cruel torture and beatings, he had turned his hate of the Japanese to love by reading the Bible and had returned to Japan after the war as a missionary.
Fuchida Converts to Christianity
Intrigued by what he read, Fuchida bought a Bible and began reading it. On April 14, 1950, he decided to become a Christian and later met DeShazer who encouraged him to be baptized. The people of Japan initially believed that Fuchida was simply being an opportunist and trying to impress the Americans; however, Fuchida proved the sincerity of his conversion by spending the rest of his life as an evangelist. Fuchida preached throughout Japan and Asia leading lost souls to salvation in Jesus Christ until he died from complications of diabetes, on May 30, 1976.
As he wrote in From Pearl Harbor to Calvary, "I would give anything to retract my actions of twenty-nine years ago at Pearl Harbor, but it is impossible. Instead, I now work at striking the death-blow to the basic hatred which infests the human heart and causes such tragedies."
Mitsuo Fuchida Military Photograph
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