Stories of Faith and Courage From World War II (41 page)

Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin. But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

—Romans 3:20–22

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ULY 26

The Men Were Noble

The routine started at 2:30 a.m. The B-17 crewmen stumbled out of bed, dressed in the cold, and plodded through the rain and mud to breakfast. Then they began assembling in the briefing room. Someone yelled, “Attention!” as the commanding officer walked down the center aisle and mounted the stage. Everyone finally came awake as the mission for the day was announced.

Jon Schueler paid close attention to every detail. As navigator for the Bad Check(named in hope that she would always come back) he carried a lot of responsibility on his shoulders. After the pre-mission briefing he and the rest of his crew climbed aboard their aircraft.

As long as the momentum of activity was going, everything would be OK. I felt the excitement, the blood coursing through my veins. I felt the intensity of it. We would start the engines reving and I’d lay out my charts and have everything ready, oxygen mask, parachute. Check all the dials. Computer, pencils, Weems plotter. Milt Conver would be making wisecracks. We could feel the plane being readied, we could feel the vibration of readiness of men moving back and forth at their dials, controls and guns. Everything was OK. We were a team and we knew each other and loved each other. The men were truly noble.
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These feelings are not uncommon in combat. You grow very close to others when you share an important mission and some degree of hardship or danger.

Twenty-five years after having such an experience, I rediscovered the same kind of intense feeling for others in the body of Christ. There is no mission that brings men and women closer together than working to bring others into the family of God. Everyone contributes unique gifts to the task, and every gift is prized by all. The key ingredient that holds this great and noble family together is the love of Jesus Christ for every member, which all the members share freely with each other.

But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

—1 Corinthians 12:18–20

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ULY 27

The Missions Had to Be Flown

Early in the war scattered British and Australian forces, often with obsolete equipment, tried to oppose the Japanese advance through East Asia. Many Royal Air Force pilots were still flying biplanes that proved easy prey to the modern Japanese Zero fighters. As comrades failed to return from missions, it became ever harder for the survivors to keep going up. One airman commented on his own feelings and on a fellow pilot’s determination to oppose the enemy invasion of Sumatra:

We were terribly fearful, some of us literally shaking… But the missions had to be flown and it was then that I saw real valour… not just flashes of it but as a part of every member’s daily life. A special bravery seemed to be generated, where fear was greatest… The courage that we saw was in the calm before the storm, of very young men… doing something that petrified them… But they did it because it was their duty.
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I think of Bob’s sheer guts on that day only with deep admiration. He was going on a mission… to find a Japanese sea force, to try to break through its fighter and anti-aircraft screens and bomb it. Scared stiff like everyone who had to make such attacks, he was so overwrought that he actually vomited on the tarmac as he went to climb into his Hudson. But he just vomited, shook his head, climbed aboard and took off.
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Could anything be more difficult than finding courage in a losing cause? These airmen knew that defeat was inevitable, but continued to find the will to do their duty. Many times we, as Christians, are discouraged by far less formidable risks. We think that certain people are hopeless and that any effort on our part to share the gospel would be futile. When we hear moral issues being discussed and sense we’re in the minority, we sometimes feel that our solitary voice will have no effect. At these times, we need the courage of these RAF pilots, who were able to leave the bigger picture in the hands of a higher authority while focusing on their individual responsibilities. Courage is action in the face of possible embarrassment or failure.

I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.

—John 14:12

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ULY 28

The Real Hero

The chaplain was up before dawn with the aircrews, sharing their last moments before another mission. He listened to the briefings and assignments, and followed their route laid out with tape across the map. As he looked at the young airmen he was almost overcome with feelings of love and fear. He knew them well, and he admired and loved them deeply. He also knew that, “For some of them it was the dawning of their last morning in this world.”
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For all of these men he was a link to home, and, as always, he gravely received their messages. This morning he was deeply moved when one man asked him to, “Tell my mother I know she is the real hero.”
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The chaplain pondered the bond between mothers and sons and concluded that both were soldiers with difficult roles to play in a difficult war, but…

The greatest soldiers are the mothers of men. While men go to battle-fronts mothers endure a bloodless martyrdom. Theirs is fortitude’s braver part, for their hearts, life-laced and “love-laced” to their sons, must endure the hungering interval when human hate makes them childless in motherhood, long before they face the sorrows of death.
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The chaplain’s thoughts turned to history’s greatest example of a heroic woman, the mother of our Savior. “ Enduring her sufferings, by her compassion, Mary then became the strength and consolation for sorrowing mothers through the ages. She who had seen the shadow of death over His whole life from the crib to the Cross, could do nothing to help her dying Son.”
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May God bless all mothers who have to stand aside as their sons go into harm’s way. They send them into the world with the gift that is the most Christ-like of all gifts: a mother’s love.

When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Dear woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”

—John 19:26–27

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ULY 29

We Trusted in Prayer

After a particularly harrowing mission through heavy flak Tommy Hayes landed his P-51 at home base in England. He described what happened as his aircraft finally rolled to a stop:

“I climbed out of the cockpit, got on my hands and knees in the mud to kiss the good earth and thank the Lord.”
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When his crew chief realized what he was doing, he got down beside him and joined in.

Hayes was a veteran pilot from Portland, Oregon. He had seen action early in the Pacific flying P-40s and had been with the 357
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Fighter Group in England since its first combat mission. He was a little older and wiser than many of his fellow pilots, eventually rising to command a squadron of P-51s flying escort missions deep into Germany. He saw more than his share of aerial combat and downed eight German aircraft. His family at home was never far from his mind.

When I left the States for Europe, I left my wife and daughter of sixteen months. We each had a job to do and we talked about that. I know the stress was greater for her than for me. She wrote me a letter every day. We lived our lives together by our letters. It helped when I shot down a plane and the local paper or radio had a story or a few words on the local boy, Major Hayes. If she hadn’t had a letter for a week or more, at least on this date she knew I was okay. I was not a drinking man. We both trusted in prayer.
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A priest once used a simple blackboard diagram to illustrate how a couple can strengthen their relationship. He drew two separate lines from the bottom of the board converging into one point at the top. The lines represent our separate lives and can, in fact, go in any direction. However, if both parties in a marriage continually strive to grow nearer to Christ at the top of the board, they will also grow closer to each other, as their lines converge. This has been an enduring image in our marriage as my wife and I have tried to keep our focus on this common goal, to be one in love and service to our Lord.

So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.

—Matthew 19:6

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ULY 30

What Would I Do?

Max Woolley bailed out of his P-38 fighter at 18,000 feet. Wounded by ground fire on the way down, his descent seemed to take forever. His parachute was riddled by bullets and almost useless by the time he hit the ground hard near Charleroi, Belgium. In a dazed state, fully expecting to be captured, he was instead picked up by a Belgian family and taken to their home. Woolley stated later that during this time,

“Prayer was the greatest source of inspiration for me… It gave me strength, consolation, and a way to talk, to plead for help and life itself.”
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The Belgian family hid him from the Germans and gave him all the care that they could:

They sacrificed their safety and gave me the best they had to offer, a place to rest, food from their sparse pantry, wet towels to subdue the stifling heat from being crammed into an eighteen-inch high enclosure and to wipe the blood and infected pus that oozed from my wounds for almost two months.

I’ve often asked myself, ‘Could I befriend a bloody, dirty, wounded man whom I had never before seen, share my scant supply of food, jeopardize the safety and welfare of myself and my family?’
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Each of us would have to agonize over this question. What would I do? Looking at our “WWJD” (What would Jesus do?) bracelets, we know what we should do. Jesus answered the question emphatically while explaining the phrase “love your neighbor” to a legal expert. He told the story of the man who was robbed and beaten beside the road. He was passed by a priest and a Levite, both “religious” men, who did not stop. A Samaritan, even though considered a foreigner, did stop to render assistance. Even though we know that we should follow the example of the Samaritan, few of us would find the courage within ourselves to do what the Belgian family did in this story. There is only one source of such strength, and that is Jesus Christ himself. When we prayerfully ask, “What would Jesus do?” we can also expect him to give us the resources to do it.

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

—Luke 10:36–37

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ULY 31

To Stay at Home

The great radio commentator Edward R. Murrow announced soberly, “Berlin last night wasn’t a pretty sight. In about thirty-five minutes it was hit with about three times the amount of stuff that ever came down on London in a night-long blitz. This is a calculated, remorseless campaign of destruction.”
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He was reporting what he actually saw while accompanying a Lancaster four-engine bomber on a nighttime raid over the German capital.

The citizens of Berlin lived in the middle of this remorseless campaign for two years. Anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, and fighter aircraft provided a strong defense for the city, and, early on, inflicted heavy losses on the enemy formations daring to venture this deeply into Germany. Still, the bombers came, and the people of the city had to cope with the mounting destruction. After every raid, they did whatever they could to repair their homes and neighborhoods. One Berliner poignantly tried to explain what kept them going:

We repair because we must repair. Because we couldn’t live another day longer if one forbade us the repairing. If they destroy our living room, we move into the kitchen. If they knock the kitchen apart, we move over into the hallway. If only we can stay ‘at home.’ The smallest corner of ‘at home’ is better than any palace in some strange place.
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We can’t understand an “air war” or bombing campaign without considering the effects on all the human beings involved. Most of this month has been seen from the perspective of the airmen flying their hazardous missions. We must also remember that the destruction on the ground was even more horrendous. By understanding and remembering the suffering on both sides we are bound to more soberly consider how to resolve our present and future conflicts. War has always and will always exact a terrible price in human suffering.