Stories of Faith and Courage From World War II (14 page)

We have sympathy for anyone like this who is suddenly jolted from calm conditions to utter chaos. How would you or I react? We hope we would be cool and confident in a crisis, but we never know until it happens. We can only pray for courage under fire and the ability to think clearly. Confidence in God and in our relationship to him is a big advantage at such a time. Jesus promised, “The peace of God, which transcends all understanding”(Philippians 4:7). This peace pertains not only to our long-term spiritual well-being, but also helps us find confidence and a calm mind in an emergency.

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.

—Acts 4:13

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EBRUARY 26

Wade McClusky

Early on June 4 Lt. Cdr. Wade McClusky led a squadron of Dauntless dive-bombers from the USS
Enterprise
in search of the Japanese carriers. Arriving at the designated point, he found the sea empty. Unknown to him or anyone else, the Japanese task force had changed course. The search then became a guessing game. Having climbed to high altitude with heavy bomb loads, fuel and time were running out.

As he was calculating his next move, McClusky looked down to see a lone Japanese ship far below:

Call it fate, luck or what you may, because at 1155 (0955 local time) I spied a lone Jap cruiser
⁷⁷
scurrying under full power to the northeast. Concluding that she possibly was a liaison ship between the occupation forces and the striking force, I altered my Group’s course to that of the cruiser. At 1205 (1005) that decision paid dividends. Peering through my binoculars which were practically glued to my eyes, I saw dead ahead about 35 miles distant the welcome sight of the Jap carrier striking force.
⁷⁸

This decision not only “paid dividends” in the Battle of Midway, it was one of the most pivotal decisions ever made in any war. Twenty minutes later McClusky’s dive-bombers delivered fatal blows to the Japanese carriers
Kaga
and
Akagi
, ensuring one of the most improbable yet decisive defeats ever inflicted in naval warfare. McClusky’s decision was one of many “lucky” events contributing to this amazing and miraculous victory.

Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. His face turned pale.

—Daniel 5:5–6

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EBRUARY 27

Another Stroke of Luck

The air group from the USS
Enterprise
was amazingly successful in finding the Japanese carrier force on June 4. The Americans were also astounded to find no fighter opposition to their attack. As Lieutenant Commander McClusky bore in on his bombing run, he discovered one more surprise:

As we neared the bomb-dropping point, another stroke of luck met our eyes. Both enemy carriers had their decks full of planes that had just returned from the attack on Midway. Later it was learned about the time we had discovered the Jap force, an enemy seaplane had detected our forces. Apparently then, the planes on deck were being refueled and rearmed for an attack on our carriers. Supposing then we, Air Group Six, had turned southward toward Midway, as the Hornet group did, I can vividly imagine the Enterprise and Hornet at the bottom of the sea as the Yorktown was some three days later.
⁷⁹

The condition of the flight decks on the Japanese carriers at this decisive moment was critical to the outcome. There was great confusion because the aircraft were being rearmed for a strike on the American carriers, instead of a second attack on Midway. The flight decks were filled with fuel lines and aviation ordnance. The bomb hits of McClusky’s dive-bombers would probably not have been fatal in themselves. However, they were devastating due to what McClusky termed “another stroke of luck.” In this case the “luck” was confusion on the part of the Japanese and the sacrifice of Torpedo 8. Human planning could not have orchestrated the sequence of these improbable circumstances.

The L
ORD
our God has shown us his glory and his majesty, and we have heard his voice from the fire.

—Deuteronomy 5:24

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EBRUARY 28

Spruance

After the war, Mitsuo Fuchida, the leader of the attack on Pearl Harbor, coauthored a book about the Battle of Midway. The book contains a foreword written by Adm. Raymond Spruance, the officer most responsible for the success of the U.S. forces during the battle. In the foreword Admiral Spruance makes this comment:

In reading the account of what happened on June 4
^th
, I am more than ever impressed with the part that good or bad fortune sometimes plays in tactical engagements. The authors give us credit, where no credit is due, for being able to choose the exact time for our attack on the Japanese carriers when they were at their greatest disadvantage—flight decks full of aircraft fueled, armed, and ready to go.
⁸⁰

Admiral Spruance displays a sense of humility unique to a military hero. He makes an unusual concession that the actions of the leaders involved were not the determining factor in this great victory. He attributes the amazing timing of his own attack to “good fortune,” which, for a nonreligious person, would be a perfectly adequate explanation. It is my belief, however, that, instead of a series of “lucky” incidents at Midway we have seen a pattern of events that shows evidence of God’s hand acting on behalf of the American forces at this crucial moment of the war. It is difficult to imagine the long-range consequence of a different outcome to this battle. If the Japanese had achieved mastery of the Pacific, America would have been forced to drastically alter its commitment to the war in Europe. The shape of Europe and the world after the war would not have been the same.

When the trumpets sounded, the people shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the people gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so every man charged straight in, and they took the city.

—Joshua 6:20

Big guns firing from U.S. warship. (National Archives)

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Battle of the Atlantic

During the 1930s, isolationist sentiment against involvement in the growing European conflict was strong. Negative public opinion and budget restrictions resulted in a meager allocation of resources to the U.S. military establishment. Up until 1940, the comfortable assumption prevailed that the army of France and the navy of Great Britain could successfully contain Nazi Germany in Europe. When this illusion was shattered, the United States, while continuing to profess “neutrality,” adopted a more open role designed to “keep England in the war” and to prepare herself for war.

Walking a political tightrope, President Roosevelt entered into base-sharing agreements with Canada and Great Britain, and pushed a “Lend-Lease” program through Congress to provide ships and materiel to the beleaguered British. On the day that Paris fell, the president signed a naval expansion bill that had been in debate for months, in effect doubling the size of the U.S. Navy.
⁸¹
Unfortunately, it would take two years to bring this expansion on line. In September 1940 the Selective Training and Service Act was passed creating the military draft.

From the beginning, the German submarine (U-boat) threat to U.S. and British shipping had been serious. With the fall of France, however, the Germans were able to establish bases on the French coast, almost doubling the effective range of their submarines. Admiral Donitz, the German commander of U-boat operations, initiated a new concept called Rudeltaktik, or “wolf-pack” tactics, enabling groups of submarines to force their way through escort screens to effectively attack merchant convoys. The toll on Allied shipping began to rise ominously. During late 1940, 217 merchant vessels were sunk, representing more than a million tons of shipping. Britain’s survival became ever more tenuous. Winston Churchill declared, “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”
⁸²

The Battle of the Atlantic continued furiously for the duration of the war. Allied losses continued to be heavy during 1942 and 1943. Upon America’s official entry into the war, German operations also moved into American waters, inflicting heavy losses on coastal shipping and commerce in the Western Hemisphere. Progress countering this threat was painfully slow. Escorted convoys were the preferred countermeasure against submarines. There just weren’t enough escorts. Slowly, more destroyers became available, as Britain, Canada, and the United States were able to commit more resources to this theater of the war. Land-based air coverage was gradually extended, and the final gap eventually filled by escort carriers after 1943.

The climax of the Battle of the Atlantic came in late April 1943 when a forty-two-ship Allied convoy came against a U-boat picket line of fifty-one submarines off Iceland. Cdr. P. W. Gretton, RN, fought a decisive action over nine days in the worst possible weather. With nine ships he sank five U-boats, while aircraft disposed of two more.
⁸³
The German high command had to reappraise strategy. After this battle, most submarine activity was directed toward less defended, and less strategic, shipping lanes.

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Sink the Bismarck

Revenge was the order of the day. The German battleship
Bismarck
had destroyed HMS
Hood
in the Denmark Strait. The British battle cruiser was the pride of the Royal Navy, and her sudden loss was one of the most shocking events of World War II. The British high command devoted every available resource to find and sink the Bismarck. The battle was joined on May 26, 1941, when a squadron of Swordfish aircraft from HMS
Ark Royal
found the enemy battleship and made a torpedo strike that damaged her steering. The next morning a group of British warships closed in with a withering surface attack that sank the Bismarck in less than two hours.

Lt. Ludovic Kennedy was on the bridge of HMS
Tartar
and watched the final moments of the great warship. His thoughts were conflicted:

It was not a pretty sight. Bismarck was a menace that had to be destroyed, a dragon that would have severed the arteries that kept Britain alive. And yet to see her now, this beautiful ship, surrounded by enemies on all sides, hopelessly outgunned and out maneuvered, being slowly battered to a wreck, filled one with awe and pity… George Whaley, our Canadian lieutenant, wrote, “What that ship was like inside did not bear thinking of; her guns smashed, the ship full of fire, her people hurt; and surely all men are much the same when hurt.” It was a thought shared by many British sailors that day.
⁸⁴

It is somehow comforting to hear these conflicting emotions in a moment of triumph. The climax of this battle was surely satisfying to every British seaman. At the same time, there were pangs of conscience at the suffering of enemy counterparts. It is reassuring to know that such humanity existed then and that it is there within each one of us now. Jesus said, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”(Matthew 9:13). In our moments of success we must open our hearts to him and let ourselves be the vessels of his mercy. This kind of loving humility is only possible through our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Yet when they were ill, I put on sackcloth and humbled myself with fasting… I went about mourning as though for my friend or brother. I bowed my head in grief.

—Psalm 35:13, 14

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At Sea on a Corvette

Corvettes were small naval vessels built early in the war to fill the urgent need for convoy escorts. Even smaller than destroyers, they were a violent ride in heavy seas. Actually designed for coastal duty, they were often pressed into the service of ocean-going convoys. Frank Curry spent much of the war on the HMCS
Kamsack
, a Canadian Navy corvette operating out of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Unending days at sea aboard these little ships was a true test of human endurance. From Curry’s diary: