The Best World War II Movie You’ve Never Seen

“We are believers in the myth of World War II,” wrote history scholar Alec Ryrie in a recent piece for First Things. It is “our religion.” By this, Ryrie means that in the absence of a unifying faith in our increasingly post-Christian age, World War II serves as one of the few remaining narratives to which the vast majority of Westerners, including most Americans, subscribe. There are clear villains: Nazis, fascists, Hitler. And there are clear heroes: the GIs who secured Normandy and Iwo Jima, the victims of the Holocaust, and Churchill. This is why images of Neville Chamberlain’s pre-war appeasement to Hitler or Nazi soldiers claiming they were “just following orders” regarding the “final solution” remain so politically potent 80 years after the war’s end.

It’s also why our entertainment industry continues to draw upon the stories of the Second World War. There were at least five World War II movies in 2024, and the popularity of such recent films as “Oppenheimer,” “Greyhound,” “Dunkirk,” “Darkest Hour,” and “Unbroken” prove the conflict will undoubtedly remain a reliable source for future cinematic production. Ryrie, however, expresses concern that tales of World War II seem to have a more emotive effect on audiences than the “heroic self-sacrifice” at the heart of his Christian faith, and, while the war offers us valuable lessons, has taught us “some misleading and even toxic ones.”

Yet however much our “faith” in World War II evinces a certain simplistic immaturity given the complex nature of so many heroes and villains, it’s also true that many of the stories of those terrible years communicate more nuanced and complicated portrayals of the human condition and its struggle with good and evil. One such tale is that told by T. Martin Bennett 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 already on its third edition.

Though Bennett’s dreams have yet to be realized — in part because he’s declined four film investment offers to fully fund the project because he would have had to surrender full creative control to others — Wounded Tiger offers an incredible, little-known story about several heroes of the war. And, arrestingly counter to our typical mythos of the war, one is a Japanese pilot who participated in the December 7, 1941 surprise assault on Pearl Harbor.

That individual was 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, making him a national war hero celebrated by the emperor himself. 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. It’s difficult to imagine a more impressive resume for a Japanese military aviator than Fuchida’s.

Running parallel to Bennett’s portrayal of Fuchida’s professional rise in the Japanese military are two other stories. The first of these is Jacob DeShazer, an Oregon farm boy who became an American bomber bombardier, participating in the daring and dangerous Doolittle Raid, the first American air operation to strike the Japanese archipelago. Though its military effectiveness was comparatively minimal, the raid had a dramatic psychological effect 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. The rest of the Covells went into hiding in the Philippine jungle to avoid the Japanese military after it invaded the archipelago. Eventually they were discovered, and, under orders from a Japanese commander known as “the Butcher of Panay,” were executed, simply for being American.

How the lives of these three people eventually became intertwined is an incredible one, 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 important events in the Pacific Theater are harrowingly described, inviting 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.

In Bennett’s capable hands, the rising tensions between Japan and the United States that culminated in bloody conflict across the Pacific Ocean are told fairly, without provocative rhetoric. Thus do we read not only of Japanese atrocities against soldiers and civilians alike, but also the deadly destruction wrought by U.S. bombing campaigns across Japan, including not only the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (killing more than 150,000 Japanese civilians), but the March 9, 1945 fire-bombing raids of Tokyo that killed another 100,000 civilians. By comparison, 12,000 American civilians died in the entirety of the war.

Though America was obviously not the aggressor in the Second World War, nor did it endorse or commit the types of war crimes committed by so many Japanese soldiers, perhaps Ryrie has a point about a certain “mythology” regarding the conflict. In some senses, our continued reliance on World War II as the defining narrative of the West reflects the limitations and even poverty of our moral imagination, given some of our heroes were culpable of misdeeds, while some of our villains demonstrated true patriotic courage, and, later, penitence for their own culpability in evil.

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 at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at 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. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.