In a recent article for First Things, history professor Alec Ryrie said,” We are believers in the myth of World War II.” It is “our spirituality”. By this, Ryrie means that in the presence of a cohesive belief in our increasingly post-Christian time, World War II serves as one of the few remaining stories to which the vast majority of Westerners, including most Americans, listen. There are distinct monsters: Germans, fascists, Hitler. And there are distinct heroes: the Map who secured Normandy and Iwo Jima, the survivors of the Holocaust, and Churchill. This is why photographs of Neville Chamberlain’s pre-war peace to Hitler or Nazi military claiming they were” just following orders” regarding the “final option” be so politically powerful 80 years after the battle’s end.
It’s also the cause of how the Second World War reports are used in our leisure industry. There were at least five World War II shows in 2024, and the popularity of quite recent movie as” Oppenheimer”,” Greyhound”,” Dunkirk”,” Darkest Hour”, and” Unbroken” prove the conflict will definitely be a reliable resource for future cinematic production. Ryrie, but, expresses concern that stories of World War II seem to have a more emotive effect on people than the “heroic self-sacrifice” at the heart of his Christian faith, and, while the battle offers us valuable instructions, has taught us” some misleading and even dangerous people”.
However, given the difficult nature of so many heroes and villains and the apparent simplicity of our “faith” in World War II, it’s also true that many of the tales of those bad times convey more nuanced and complex representations of the human condition and its conflict with good and evil. In Wounded Tiger: The Transformational True Story of the Japanese Pilot Who Led the Pearl Harbor Attack, originally penned as a screenplay for an epic motion picture and is already in its third edition, T. Martin Bennett tells one such tale.
Wounded Tiger tells an incredible, little-known tale about several heroes of the war, though Bennett’s dreams have not yet been realized as a result of his declining four film investment offers to fully fund the project. One of the Japanese pilots who participated in the surprise assault on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, is arrestingly contrary to our typical myths about the war.
Mitsuo Fuchida, an officer in the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service who led the first wave of air attacks on America’s main naval base in the Pacific, earned the emperor himself the title of a national war hero. A few months later, Fuchida led the first of two waves of Japanese aircraft conducting a raid on Darwin, Australia, two months after that, he commanded air assaults against British naval bases in Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka. A Japanese military aviator’s resume might not be as impressive as Fuchida’s.
Running parallel to Bennett’s portrayal of Fuchida’s professional rise in the Japanese military are two other stories. Jacob DeShazer, a farm boy from Oregon who joined the risky and dangerous Doolittle Raid, the first American air raid to strike the Japanese archipelago, is the first of these. Although its military impact was comparatively unimportant, the raid had a profound psychological impact on Japan. DeShazer’s B-25 then flew to China, where the crew parachuted and was promptly captured by the Japanese. Three of his crew members were executed, while DeShazer was beaten, tortured, and starved by his Japanese captors.
Finally, there is the story of the Covell family, American missionaries who served in Japan and the Philippines. Peggy, one of the daughters of the family, spent the duration of the conflict as a student in Keuka College, New York. After the Japanese military invaded the archipelago, the rest of the Covells fled to hide in the Philippine jungle. Eventually they were discovered, and, under orders from a Japanese commander known as” the Butcher of Panay”, were executed, simply for being American.
The intertwining of these three people’s lives is incredible, but the Christian virtues of mercy and forgiveness loom large. I wary of giving too much away, given Bennett’s hope this may very well one day become a major motion picture, so it is perhaps enough to say that both Fuchida, a practitioner of Shinto, and DeShazer, who was an atheist, both converted to Christianity, and in time became evangelists and friends.
Bennett is an excellent story-teller, his short, tight chapters interspersed with an impressive number of photos, primary documents, and maps that brings the narrative alive. Many of the most significant Pacific Theater events are bravely described, drawing the reader into the action. It’s also remarkable that Fuchida seemed to be everywhere in those years, including at Pearl Harbor, Midway, the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, and the bombing of Hiroshima.
The rising tensions between Japan and the United States, which sparked a bloody conflict across the Pacific Ocean, are effectively told in Bennett’s capable hands without provoking rhetoric. Thus are read the horrific atrocities committed by Japan against both soldiers and civilians, as well as the devastating destruction caused by U.S. bombing campaigns throughout Japan, including not only the atomic bombings dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (killing more than 150, 000 Japanese civilians ), but also the Tokyo firebombing raids on March 9, 1945, which also claimed the lives of another 100, 000 civilians. By comparison, 12, 000 American civilians died in the entirety of the war.
Although America was undoubtedly not the war’s aggressor in the Second World War and did not support or commit the kinds of war crimes committed by numerous Japanese soldiers, Ryrie may have made a point about a particular “mythology” regarding the conflict. Given that some of our heroes were convicted of crimes against humanity, while others were accused of exhibiting true patriotic courage and, later, penitence for their own culpability in evil, our continued reliance on World War II as the defining narrative of the West reflects this.
Nevertheless, it’s also true, as Bennett proves, that some of the stories from that era are capable of overcoming those limitations, revealing the complexity — and wonderful, redemptive beauty — of our very broken human drama. Let’s hope he gets his movie deal.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a columnist and editor for The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands is his book.
