This is part of a chapter from my 400+ page book. I sent part of it out to you two years ago, but the plethora of people reading these stories in China did not get to see it. And because they want to see it, I am herewith sending an edited version to you again.
Ron
When I started to Junior High School we moved out to this heavily wooded area about 5 miles west of Waco. It was called Rainbow Lake, for there was a beautiful blue mile long lake together with a little smaller lake just next to it. Our home looked right down onto the larger lake. There was a very large area surrounding the lakes, and it was all owned in common as a private club. There were only 5 homes scattered on both sides of the larger lake. It was such a large area, that the homes were separated from each other by many acres between them. You did not hear anyone else or even have anyone else close to you at all.
On the other side of the house from the lake were thousands of acres of virgin wooded land. Much of the ground was white limestone on the surface. The whole area had been inhabited by Indians long ago, for there were flint arrowheads all over the whole place. Out in those woods there were beautiful, perfect arrowheads just laying right on top of the white limestone out in the open. That showed that no one went into those woods, for they would surely have picked up those arrowheads. I accumulated quite a collection of them.
In the early pioneer times the people had some beef and pork, but in the earliest days they mostly lived off of wild game for meat. They ate ducks, geese, doves, wild pigeons, rabbits, deer, bear; all manner of wild game. However, their favorite tasting meat out of all those was squirrel.
Davey Crockett and his friends would divide-up into two groups and hunt squirrels for two weeks or more. The meat would keep well with the insides cleaned out, the skin left on, and hung in the shade, in the open air. Then they would have a grand squirrel feast. The group who got the most squirrels was the winner. The loser had to skin and cook all the squirrels.
They would first parboil the meat for a short time in boiling water, then either barbeque it or, their favorite, deep fry it in an iron kettle in pig fat. They would spend two days or more feasting on squirrel.
Since my father was president of that big freight line, he traveled much of the time on weekdays. He lived off restaurant food, but when he got back home, his favorite meat was squirrel, also.
Other boys, like my peers at school, had the luxury of sleeping late on Saturday mornings; but I had to get up before daylight on Saturday mornings and get my father at least two squirrels. My semi-automatic Browning 22 rifle held 11 shells. I would take it and go across the fence into those deep, dense woods. They stretched for miles and miles. I would sit very still for as long as it took for a squirrel to come across the trees overhead. So that I would not mess-up the meat, I was required to hit them only through the rib cage or preferably in the head. I eventually became such a good shot that when I got into Baylor, I qualified to be on their intercollegiate rifle team and travel to rifle meets all over the country.
After several years, my squirrel hunting job got easier. My mother had two old maid aunts who still lived in the backwoods in Tennessee in the log house that their brothers had been born in before they came to Texas. We would visit them sometimes in the summertime. It was very enjoyable. They still lived in that subsistence lifestyle. They grew all their own vegetables, and fruits. They slopped and killed their own hogs and smoked the hams in a tall smoke house by the barns. One of the barns still had the spinning wheels and looms from which they had make the clothes that their brothers wore when they came to Texas. And everything was made of wood……fences, gates, barn doors, locks, everything. They didn’t have an outhouse. You just went out behind one of the barns and used corn cobs.
I had never slept in a real feather bed. Wow, you dived into those and sunk way down and “just died” asleep. Those breakfasts they cooked on the wood burning stove in the kitchen were fantastic. When they found out that I loved fried pies, they would make me big flat ones from their apples and apricots out of their orchards in big cast-iron skillets.
Anyway, on one trip my father told the locals there that he wanted to buy the best squirrel dog in that whole part of Tennessee. They all acknowledged that “Toby”, a ¾ cross Bull Terrier, was the best squirrel dog there. Since no one had ever been willing to pay a whole $35 for a hunting dog in that part of Tennessee. We were able to take Toby back to Texas.
We were anxious to try him out when we got back. I had a little black and brown Manchester Terrier that my mother’s friend had given me named “Toy”. Toy went with us as we all headed into those woods with our guns and Toby. In only a little while Toby had treed a squirrel on the edge of this creek. We all went rushing there and sure enough there was a big squirrel up in the trees. Since my father had a shotgun, he brought the squirrel down first. As it came crashing down, Toy, not Toby, grabbed it before it even hit the ground. It didn’t take Toy long to figure out what this was all about. She became as good a squirrel dog as Toby, if not better.
Toby had the most interesting habit. When a person comes up, the squirrel will always slip around to the other side of the tree so you can’t see it. When you were by yourself as I most always was, the squirrel would move back to the first side of the tree when I would go around to the back side of the tree. But every time, Toby would go around to the other side of the tree from me and grab a little bush and just violently shake it in his teeth. He would scare the squirrel back around to my side of the tree so that I could shoot it. He greatly improved my hunting success. I have no idea how he learned this.
I know that I am probably boring you with all of this but let me tell you about one morning in the late Fall. When I would bring out the gun, the dogs would just go “nuts” jumping and turning flips. They just loved to go hunting. By this time Toby had gotten killed, so I took Toy and three half grown pups that I was trying to train.
We had gotten at least a mile down in those wild woods before Toy treed. I was down in a dry creek bed with steep sides at least 12 feet high. It was very strange, because it would sound like Toy was way off, and then sound like she was up close. Finally, I heard her just above us. I was able to go around a little bend in the creek where the creek sides were not as steep. The pups and I scrambled up onto the flat ground. Then we saw why her sounds were different. She had something in a big, hollow log that she was after. She would bark with her head just inside the log and sound way off. Then would bark outside the log and sound close; but she would not go into the log.
However, when those boisterous pups got there they just bolted straight into the log. All of a sudden big ringed-tailed civet cats just started pouring out of several places from the log. Most people have never seen those cats because they are totally nocturnal.
They are tan and grey like a fox, but they have this really long black and white ringed tail. They can be very aggressive, especially when surprised and disturbed.
One of them grabbed one of the pups by the leg and they went round and round. This big female came running right at me, but just before she reached me, Toy bolted forward and grabbed her by the throat. They went rolling over and over and both fell off down into the dry creek, but Toy never let go of her throat.
Then out the far end of the log came this huge male civet cat. He was not about to run away. He ran right at me and ripped my blue jeans with his claw, but never stopped. I was so startled and he was so close that I could not get a shot at him. I really needed a shotgun; not that little Browning 22 semi-automatic. He went straight up this little tree next to us and out onto one of its limbs. I shot two or three times, but he was going so fast that I missed. At this point he was just even with my head. Then, “so help me” he bolted through the air, right at my throat. I threw the gun up in defense and just started pulling that trigger.
He was so close that I could not aim, and I am certain that a “Higher Power” directed the last bullet. For it went right into his open mouth. He fell dead right at my feet. I had heard about it but had never experienced it. For my legs just gave way and I sank right down onto that log.
What I remember at that point was this awful screaming of the big female civet cat down in the creek with blood in her throat; just a chilling sound. Toy had never let go of her throat and finally choked her to death. And the pup had gotten away from his adversary. It was quite a violent scene. I took the big male home to show my father.
You can say that I was just lucky, but you will never get me to admit it. I just know that God had some tough angel direct that bullet into that cats open mouth as it was right in mid-air, almost to my throat!!!
Fairly Young Ringed Tail Civet Cat Near Austin Texas
This is an excerpt from my soon to be published book. I have sent it before, but in this edited version I am sending it again since the huge number of people in China who are reading these stories every day have not seen it.
Joe Foss
One of the greatest heroes of WWII and the epitome of the Greatest Generation was Joe Foss. He grew up really poor on a farm in South Dakota . He learned to hunt and was quite the outdoorsman. He did manage to enroll in the University of South Dakota and was big in all their athletic programs, but had to drop out to go back and help his mother on the family farm. However, he later enrolled again and graduated with a degree in Business in 1940.
Joe on South Dakota Football Team
He had seen Limburg at an airfield when he was younger, and was determined to fly. He had already scraped together enough money for flying lessons and had his civilian license, so he joined the Marine Reserves and went to flight school. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he was Officer of the Day at Pensacola and rode around the base on his bicycle looking for Japs.
He was not allowed to train as a fighter pilot as he desperately wanted. They said at age 27 he was too old. He was instead assigned to an aerial photographer’s squadron. Joe just could not abide that, especially after he saw one of the new F4F Wildcats. He put up such a ruckus that they assigned him to a squadron of Wildcats.
He and his plane were loaded onto an aircraft carrier and sent straight across the Pacific. He arrived at just the time that we invaded Guadalcanal . The Marines captured the Japanese airfield there and set up residence. Joe’s carrier was sent straight there and he was catapulted off for his only takeoff from a carrier. He landed on the bomb pocked field which the Marines had named Henderson Field and became part of the Cactus Air Force on Guadalcanal .
Cactus Air Force on Guadalcanal
The Japanese were determined to push them off that island. They mounted attack after attack by land, and mounted daily air strikes. They came up what was called “The Slot” between the islands to shell them from the sea. They even flew over at night to keep the guys from sleeping. The Grumman F4F was no match for the agile Japanese Zeros, but Joe Foss was absolutely ferocious. He led their daily flights and many times afternoon flights. The Japanese bombed daily with their Betty Bombers protected by their Zeros.
Joe became an ace in only 5 days. In only a few more days he had 11 kills, but lost 4 Wildcats from getting shot-up because of his daring maneuvers. Because they had so few planes and even less ammunition Joe learned to get in really close before firing. The Japs made it hard to get fuel and ammunition and supplies into their base by patrolling up and down what became known as Iron Bottom Sound. Joe even led his small squadrons out to strafe the Jap destroyers and shoot down the Zeros protecting them.
Within the first 13 days, Joe had wracked up 14 kills, and on October 25, 1942 he became the first Navy pilot to ace on enemy planes in one day.
The pilots would bath in the river there and try to get some sleep. The men there mostly slept in the daytime since the Jap night fighters made it so hard to sleep at night. For sport, Joe and his pilot friends would roam in the jungle on afternoons they were not flying, hunting Japanese soldiers to kill. But Colonel Bauer put a stop to that since they were too valuable as pilots to risk such hunting.
After 23 victories on Guadalcanal Joe caught malaria like so many others there. Since he was so valuable, they flew him off to recuperate in Australia for awhile. But they couldn’t keep this ferocious South Dakota fighter away. He went back and rejoined the Cactus Air Force and had 3 more kills for a total of 26.
It was No Match for the Jap Zeros, but Joe loved that F4F Wildcat
His most important mission resulted in no enemy kills at all. The Japanese came with a big task force of ships and a huge contingent of Betty’s and Zeros. Joe was credited with leading a daring performance. He circled above the enemy aircraft and ships in such a way as to trick them into thinking he was leading an advance squadron of a much, much larger strike force of US planes. It resulted in the Japanese calling off their whole mission without a shot being fired.
While the war was still young, Joe was called back to the States to rally morale and stump for the War Bond selling effort. He traveled all over and was a huge success.
He already had a bunch of medals, but in May of 1943 he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Roosevelt.
In later years, Joe Foss became Governor of South Dakota. He was the first Commissioner of the American Football League. He even served as President of the National Rifle Association for 2 years. But he would always be a Marine!
Now to what I really wanted to tell you. A few years ago, I had the privilege of spending several days and a weekend with Joe Foss and his good friend, Roy Rogers at a Here’s Life Meeting in Palm Springs . I can attest that they are both not just strong Christians, but are personally really close to the Lord.
I asked Roy Rogers if he was reared on a ranch as a cowboy out west. He told me: “Naw man, I am from Duck Run Missouri. We were so poor; the road did not even go past our house. It stopped at our house.” I said. “But you are a Hollywood cowboy that has blessed so many people”. And he said, “Well, I thought that was the best route to take. My biggest step up the ladder was when I married Dale Evans, who was way farther up the ladder than I was.” Then Dales Evans, who was standing there with him, chimed in: “Yea, and he almost lost me when I found out that he came together with all those hound dogs of his.”
Roy, and Joe Foss were big quail hunters. But I got the chance to ask Roy if he had any other hobbies than hunting quail and chasing foxes with his hound dogs. So he told me all about his hobby of diligently collecting the songs that the early pioneers sang around their camp fires at night on their wagon train trips to Oregon and California . He has collected as many of those as he could before they were lost to posterity.
I asked Joe Foss when was the last time he and Roy went quail hunting. He said last season. “When we almost lost Roy .” Then he related how they were getting lots of quail one afternoon when they shot one quail that fell way across a creek. So Roy said: “Don’t worry I will go over and get that quail, because the dogs don’t even see it.” However, Joe Foss said that Roy never came back. He and their friend went down there and found Roy by the creek. He had turned blue and really looked bad. They got the pick-pup truck and loaded him in the back and headed for town. Joe said they kept watching him through the back window. They said he kept fishing around in is pocket with his finger and finally found his bottle of nitroglycerin pills and popped some in his mouth. In a few minutes he was banging in the back window of the truck wanting to go back hunting. But they took him on to the hospital.
Now let me get to the real point, and theme of this book. I asked Joe Foss, “Governor Foss, (I could have said General Foss, for he was later promoted to Brigadier General in the Air National Guard, but he liked ‘Governor’) it is for sure that God protected you in the Pacific. Time and again you were given up for lost, and here you would come back, walking out of the jungle with a stalk of bananas over your shoulder. But is there one specific occasion when it was very obvious that God’s Spirit Power just came down and saved you when everything was totally lost and there was no way out”. And he said, “Yes there was, Ronald, there certainly was”. So, I asked him to tell me and my group of friends there about it.
So, Governor Foss said that late one evening off a strongly held Japanese island his plane got all shot-up. His engine sputtered and quit. He glided low way off the end of that island and ditched in the water. He managed to get out and into his little yellow life raft just as it was getting dark. He knew that the Japanese saw him go down and that, in the morning, they would be coming for him. They knew who he was as flight leader on all those raids and air battles. He had heard about their torture tactics. He knew that they would not give him a quick death, but what was going to happen to him could be described as worse than death. So he floated there in the water dreading tomorrow morning.
Something else happened, though, as he splashed into the water just before dark. Some natives on that island, who really hated the Japanese, saw him go down, also. He was quite a ways out there, but they rowed all the way out in their outrigger canoes and were able to find him in the total darkness. They took him back and hid him, and then passed him along to other natives until he finally got back to his unit.
Governor Joe said you could consider that a fortuitous accident, but that he considered it “a divine, life saving, intervention of God on his behalf.”
This is a chapter from my 400+ page book. I sent part of it out to you two years ago, but the plethora of people reading these stories in Chin did not get to see it. And because they want to see it, I am herewith sending it again.
Miss Ella
Ella Graham lived west of Waco , west of Crawford right close to where George Bush’s ranch is now located. She was a good family friend and totally blind. She went blind when she was only 4 years of age. She thought that she could remember colors but was not sure. She was in her early 70’s and had been the first blind school teacher ever in Texas in the little Crawford high school.
She was very cultured and very romantic. Even at her age she was still a beautiful white-haired lady. When she was a student at Baylor they say she was just gorgeous. Though the young men just lined-up to read her lessons to her back then, she never married. She said that she felt that being blind, she would have been too much of a burden on a husband.
But she was such a romantic person that she had gotten her degree at Baylor in Browning. You know, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning the famous poets who wrote all those romantic poems and that romantic prose. Surely you have read it or heard it…….. like Elizabeth ’s Sonnet 43 as she wrote to her lover, Robert……….
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use in my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”
Wow! Now that’s romantic! And Robert Browning’s famous poem/song………Pippa Passes…….as innocent Pippa sings as she passes by……
The year’s at the spring And day’s at the morn; Morning’s at seven; The hillside’s dew-pearled; The lark’s on the wing; The snail’s on the thorn: God’s in His heaven— All’s right with the world!
The famous Browning Library at Baylor has a bronze statue of Pippa out in front of it, and inside it has all the memorabilia of the Brownings’…….most all of their complete works and even their actual desks from which their writings were done.
Yes, Miss Ella was such a romantic. She wrote to me on an old typewriter with blue ink ribbon. Her prose was like reading poetry. I have kept all of her letters. Many times when I would have a date with one of those beautiful Baylor girls, I would drive out to Crawford and take her along with us. She would so enjoy it. The girls would not mind as she lightly looked them over with her fingers. She was always so interested in their hands. She judged them some way or other by how their fingers were shaped.
She would particularly enjoy it when we would take her to the movies. I think it was because this was something blind ladies never did.
So, one time she was visiting our home at Rainbow Lake . It was late in the afternoon. We were sitting in front of that big picture window that looked down over the lake. The other windows were wide open to let in the lovely Spring air. And this daddy Cardinal was just singing his Springtime song at the top of his voice.
See, Miss Ella just loved Cardinals. They would sing to her outside her bedroom windows near Crawford. She would mention it sometimes in her letters as she was typing. Her lovely stationary even had a picture of a red daddy Cardinal at the top of it.
Then, as we were listening to the bird’s song, Miss Ella said: “Oh, Ronny, I do so wish that I could see a Cardinal!”
And I must have just prayed, for I distinctly remember thinking: “Lord, why can’t this lovely, Godly woman see a Cardinal?”
But I was jolted to attention, for my mother called to me to go out to the boat house and get some meat for supper out of the freezer. I jumped-up and went out the kitchen door and opened the side door to the boat house. Someone had left one of the big garage-type doors up off the floor for a few inches. And this bird had gotten into the closed boat house. There on the floor, right in front of the freezer was this gorgeous, scarlet Cardinal.
He didn’t bolt up and fly against the glass windows as one would expect. He just let me catch him.
We eventually took it back outside and she let it go and it flew softly away.
Now you can say that was just a fortunate accident, but I know with the perfect timing and all, exactly where that bright red Cardinal really came from. It was no accident for that bird to be right there at that exact moment just for Miss Ella to “see”.
If you would like to watch a wonderful, life changing movie, get yourself all prepared with the time to watch a full length movie, and then go to this site and be ready for a life changing experience. .…………….. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/english.html
This is a chapter from my 400+ page book. I sent part of it out to you two years ago, but the plethora of people reading these stories in China did not get to see it. And because they really want to see it, I am herewith sending it again. Please consider its message! It really happens. It is not some theory!
The Fish Fall
I would usually take our medical teams to the east coast of Honduras. There are so many really poor villages of people there along the coast and inland from there. However, we went two times into the Province of Yoro in the central highlands, and the town of Yoro with teams sponsored by First Baptist Church of Carrollton, Texas. This is an extremely poor area of Honduras.
Homes in La Union at Yoro
At Yoro there is a strange thing that happens every year, and sometimes two to four times a year. Fish fall from the sky. The locals call it, lluvia de pesces.
When I first heard of it, of course I did not believe it. How could such happen. But I met so many people from there, including my eventual evangelist lady, Onelia, that herself had gathered the fish in baskets and had sea food that they only get to eat that one or a few more times a year. They consider it a gift from God, and so many of these people are so desperately poor that they really need the protein, especially at that time of the summer.
Poor Couple in La Union
This has been happening for generations. They say that in the mid 1800’s a Catholic missionary named Manuel de Jesús Subirana came to Yoro to minister to the people. He was so distressed over their poverty and lack of food that he fasted and prayed for three days and three nights. The people say that immediately after that the fish started falling and have done so ever since. A team from National Geographic actually got to be there and record it in the 1970’s. And on our second trip to Yoro I missed it by only two weeks.
There is a mountain range just to the west of Yoro. Onelia said that when the clouds got extremely black coming over those mountains she would ask the priest if it was time. He would say that they need to be even more black. Finally, he would say: “Get your baskets, it is time”. And after those clouds have passed, they would go out to this field and fill their baskets with fish.
Having an engineering degree and having taken all those science courses, I really wanted an explanation; so I set out to find the answer. Sometimes the fish are small and silver colored like sardines, but more often they are much larger. I got Onelia and some of the other people there to draw me pictures of exactly what the larger fish looked like.
I have had some great times with my father catching big sail fish in the Pacific fairly near shore in southern Mexico. Every time we went out, we would pass large schools of bonito schooling right on top of the water.
Those pictures that they drew looked exactly like the bonito, which are related to tuna fish.
Almost every afternoon, cold air would drift out from the mountains there and water spouts would drop down and just “play around” over the water. Sometimes we would have to wait until they went back up into the clouds before we could get back with our boat to where we were staying. I just know that sometimes those bonito were sucked up and carried over the mountains to Yoro. But you say, how could a storm be that strong?
On the afternoon that our medical team was coming back from the mountain where we had ministered to the Indians that had never seen a white man, I saw what it looks like. From our eclectic caravan of cars and trucks, we saw a storm coming toward us from the west. I have seen lots of weather, but I have never seen clouds that incredibly black and lightning that intense. Sometimes in Texas storm clouds will look dark blue, but these were absolutely black. I did not hear of any fish coming down that day, but I could see how a storm that intense could keep fish up there and carry them east.
So I thought that I was so smart for figuring out how this happened. Then I saw the pictures from National Geographic, the New York Times, and the History Channel and others that had recorded those fish falling. And I knew that I was not correct, for there were all kinds of fish and different colors. I have no “rational” or “practical” explanation. Some of those pictures showed fish with no eyes. They had to have come from some cavern or underground river to have no eyes. And why do those fish fall every year just in that spot……most in just one field adjacent to Yoro at La Unión. Maybe the people are correct. Maybe God is sending them protein as was promised to the missionary, Manuel de Jesús Subirana, so many, many years ago.
Fish that have just Fallen on a Street in Yoro
Of course, the people there consider it a direct gift from God, and I would not dispute them. They really need the protein. Sometimes the fish fall in town, but almost without exception, for several generations the fish fall in a particular field next to a suburb of Yoro called, La Unión.
Field where the Fish Fall at La Union
They even have a festival and parade in little La Unión every year where they elect a “Miss Falling Fish” as queen…..Senorita Lluvia de Peces…….or, Miss Fish Rain. She rides in a float dressed as a mermaid.
Festival at La Union
Since I know some of you still won’t believe this, here is an article from the New York Times from last summer:
Like I wrote before, here in the U.S. which has so many churches and Christian media, evidently God does not need to show his Spirit Power so much. However, you get far enough away to places with little Christian influence, and one gets to see actual manifestations of God’s Spirit Power.
If you would like to watch a wonderful, life changing movie, get yourself all prepared with the time to watch a full length movie, and then go to this site and be ready for a life changing experience. .…………….. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/english.html
This is a most important chapter from my 400+ page book. I sent part of it out to you two years ago, but the plethora of people reading these stories in Chin did not get to see it. And because they need to see it, and because it is so desperately important, I am herewith sending it to you again. Please consider its message! It is real, not some theory!
Dr. Peter Pry
I have written about a bunch of amazing people in this book. Most of them have already died. Many were so close to God, and God used them to do some amazing things for Him.
Now I want to tell you about one who is still very much alive as I write this.
It is my opinion that God has tasked him with warning us about and to immediately prepare for what can only be described as an absolute catastrophe if we don’t prepare for it.
First, let me show you my good friend’s credentials:
Dr. Peter Vincent Pry:
Executive Director of the Task Force on US National and Homeland Security,
He served in the Congressional EMP Commission as Chief of Staff,
The Congressional Strategic Posture Commission,
The House Armed Services Committee,
The CIA
Author of “Blackout Wars” and a Plethora of Articles and Studies
To show you about where his heart and thoughts are let me quote for you a few paragraphs from him. I am writing this on May 1, 2019. He wrote the following only last week and it was put in a national publication this morning:
“The Age of Science boasts Reason has triumphed over Faith, and God is dead. Christianity is hounded from the public square, is silenced, or worse mocked and despised, in our schools, modern art, and entertainment.
“Christianity and its child Western Civilization are thought so shameful among “intellectual elites” they would brainwash us into their new faith that is secular humanism, replace Christ with Marx, suborn individualism to collectivism, replace thought with “group think,” confuse the just society with “social justice,” and abandon free markets and free nations for the tyranny of socialism and globalism.
“Is Mankind better served by reviving, or at least understanding, Judeo-Christian values that built and sustained Western Civilization for 2,000 years, until the 20th Century — or by the new “religion” of secular humanism that worships false science and the technocratic state, that dominates society and governments in the 21st Century?
“Western secular humanists and socialists will vehemently protest they have nothing in common with the USSR, Nazi Germany, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela — even as they embrace atheism and Marxism, shout down and mock the religious, and pretend to subscribe to objectivity and “science” in order to achieve “social justice.”
“All totalitarian movements start this way, promising a Worker’s Paradise, delivering concentration camps and doomsday.
“ Let us hope and pray for the resurrection of God’s law and Christ in the hearts and minds of men.”
Do you know what an Electro Magnetic Pulse is? The last one to hit the earth as it zapped out from our sun happened when Charlie Goodnight was only 23 years old, September 2, 1859.
Just a relatively small nuclear explosion high above the central US would also cause one. You would not feel it. You would not even see it, unless you were looking straight up over the central US when the relatively small nuclear device was detonated 70 to 72 kilometers up in the stratosphere. However, the pulse would fuse any two pieces of metal that are close together…..like the firing pin in most guns, all electronic devices, the ignition system in any car made after 1973. In an instant most all cars on the road stop and all parked cars will not start. All planes in the air go down. But most of all, our entire electric grid is wiped out. And this happens from the east coast to the west coast and from central Canada to Mexico City, most likely never ever to return in our lifetime.
Will this ever happen? I met with a select group in our State of Texas Capital a few months ago. There were several analysts from the CIA there as well as knowledgeable National Security Analysts and Engineers, and Military Officers. Many of us have read the only good book written about EMP, One Second After. The author of that book, William R. Forstchen, was even there. Texas State Senator Hall was there too. His previous job as an Air Force Officer was to shield our large missiles from EMP. These folks were adamant that there is no other threat as likely and probable to happen to the US as this threat. Forget global warming. The following information is from………. Peter Vincent Pry, Ph.D. and Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security. He was many years at the CIA and knows more about EMP than most anyone.
He absolutely expects it to happen. He is almost what I would describe as frantic about it. It will happen from one of three ways:
(1) Iran or some other rogue nation will get hold of a nuclear device, sail into the Caribbean on a tramp steamer and launch it with a cheap Scud missile of which Iran has plenty. They really don’t have to aim it well, just get it up somewhere over the central US. It does not need to be a really big one like a hydrogen bomb, just a small atomic one. The Iranians are just salivating about this. They could then fight us with swords like the Muslims of old.
(2) North Korea has two satellites traveling several times a day from southwest Texas up over the Central US. The CIA analysts and Dr. Pry said that each weighs between 250 and 300 lbs. They say that they are sure that one or both have a nuclear device in them. They don’t need a spy satellite to weigh that much. If they don’t have such a bomb in them, the North Koreans can easily put up another satellite that does.
(3) We are way over-due for such a major pulse to hit earth from the sun. It has happened regularly in earth’s history. Dr. Pry says that the last big one was on Sept. 2, 1859. We did not have an electric grid then, but we did have telegraph lines. The entire existing telegraph system was fried and wiped out. It even traveled down the rail lines and warped the rails wherever they curved. All those warped rails had to be replaced. An EMP of that same magnitude from the sun very narrowly missed the earth in the fall of 2012.
Dr. Pry says that conservatively 30 million or more people in the US would be dead in 30 days. However, the CIA analysts say 90% of the US population will be dead in 30 days. Without electricity they would not have water. But you say, I know where to get water from surface sources. Yes, but the tens and tens of thousands of people going to those same sources would have it so fouled that it would not be potable for most folks. The CIA analysts there told me that they keep a little back-pack in their cars, mostly filled with water purification tablets. When I asked why, they said that when their car stops wherever they may be, they just want to try to be able to get back home.
Forstchen called his fiction book about the result of this happening to a small US community, “One Second After”, because it all happens in just one second.
No more electronic devices of any kind would exist. All bank records are gone. Everything stored in every computer, even in the cloud, is gone. There would be no more communications, no cell phones, and certainly no TV or radio. In that one instant, we would be plunged back into the 14th Century.
Most folks don’t realize that our electric grid is tied together and dependent on a few massive, extremely heavy transformers. They are so heavy that they are very hard to transport to the strategic sites where they are needed. They can only be manufactured by hand. They are not made in the US; they are made in Japan and in Germany. These would all be “fried” with an EMP. It is doubtful then, if ever they could be replaced.
In 2001 Congress established a commission to study the danger of an electromagnetic pulse generated by the detonation of a high-altitude nuclear weapon. It concluded that while there would be no blast effects on the ground, critical electricity-dependent infrastructure would be rendered inoperable. The commission’s chairman, William R. Graham, has noted that several Russian generals told the commissioners in 2004 that the designs for a “super EMP nuclear weapon” had been transferred to North Korea. While a regular nuclear bomb will achieve an EMP, the Russians have been perfecting certain ones for maximum EMP effect.
Recently the news media reported how a North Korean medium range missal was destroyed in mid-flight. They expressed their confusion about why it had been destroyed when it was operating successfully. Dr. Pry told me that the media did not understand that this was a test of how one of their missals can go up to deliver an EMP nuclear device and be exploded at just the optimum height for an EMP blast.
I wrote an email about this subject to some of my friends. I mentioned the two North Korean satellites and how their paths carry them up over the Central US every day. Someone got that email to Lou Dobbs. You have probably seen him on Fox Business News on his weekday broadcasts each evening. He read it on his program, verbatim……word for word. And if you have watched him, you have seen how when something strikes him as very cogent, he will look right into the camera and comment on it.
On this occasion, when he got to the part of my email about the North Korean satellites, he looked right into the camera and said very earnestly: “Why in the world haven’t we shot those two things down!”
In late 2017, just before Kim Jong-un became involved with President Trump, he made an interesting statement. He said publicly, directly to the United States through a translator: “If you people don’t stop messing with me, you are all going to live like dogs!”
As a proud American, I hate to admit it, but until we at least get our electric grid hardened, maybe we had better listen.
At that conference in the Texas Capital all those important people from across the US had come all the way down to Austin, Texas. When I asked them why they were there, they had a very practical answer. They were most all desperately anxious for us to get our electric grid hardened to withstand such a magnetic pulse before it is too late. They don’t want to see 90% of the whole US population dead in their homes and in the streets. They expressed that they are in effect, hitting a stone wall in trying to get the grid hardened.
They said that since Texas is the only state with its own grid, and since as they put it: “Texans are tougher, more energetic, and in our opinion more apt to do it than anyone else. “We are here to try to get you to do it as an example to for the rest of the nation.”
On July 9, 1962, the US launched a Thor missile from Johnston Island, an atoll about 1500 kilometers (900 miles) southwest of Hawaii. The missile arced up to a height of over 1100 km (660 miles), then came back down. At the preprogrammed height of 400 km (240 miles), the 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead detonated. We wanted to test one of our nuclear warheads so high up that no damage or results on the earth were expected.
It was called Operation Starfish, and all hell broke loose.
Here is a picture of the first part of the explosion
From this explosion, we learned much more about EMP than we had ever known before.
There were not many satellites up at that time. But the EMP fried the insides of the 6 satellites above that area at that moment and caused many others to fail later.
Even though it was way higher than the 30 to 40 miles which are optimum for EMP effect, it fried most of the telephone system in Hawaii, damaged the electric systems for hundreds of miles around, and wiped out most of the street lights in Hawaii. If Hawaii’s electric grid had not been so underdeveloped and analog, it would have been totally destroyed instead of just badly damaged.
Congressman Bob Hall desperately wants Texas (at least) to harden its electric grid against an EMP. Here is what he sent out to his constituents recently in an email report:
There was a time when life without electricity was the norm. By the 1930s, the majority of people living in larger towns and cities enjoyed the luxury, but only 10 percent of Americans who lived on farms or in rural areas had electric power. In 1936 the Rural Electric Administration was created to bring electricity to rural areas. No longer a luxury, electricity is now considered to be essential to life. A resilient power supply is essential to sustaining economic prosperity.
A prolonged power outage today would result in a complete breakdown in the fabric of society as we know it. Without power, communications systems would go down, creating a chaotic response to the situation. While limited locations would have access to temporary generators, as the on-site fuel for those generators is expended, replacement services would be at a standstill. Pipelines and transportation systems would be immobilized. Medically fragile individuals with dependency on machines would be some of the first victims. Those who depend on life-saving medications would be next as diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes, currently controlled by medication, become death sentences. Then, as clean water supplies are compromised and waste water treatment plants are overwhelmed, diseases commonly associated with third world countries would become prevalent.
While Texas history with hurricanes, wildfires, ice storms and critters has made the state well-prepared for short term outages of power, there has been no significant planning for a catastrophic long-term loss of the electric grid that could be the result of cyber, natural, or man-made causes. The very idea that a single event causing the loss of the electric grid could plunge the entire nation back into a time without electricity, cell phones or the internet is so overpowering that it is easier to ignore the threat than to plan for it.
At that conference in Austin, their one plea was to try to get us to harden our electric grid against an EMP. It is not that hard or expensive. The CIA folks and the military folks and Dr. Pry were here in Texas to plead with us to harden our grid as an example for the rest of the country, because Texas is the only state in the US with its own independent, separate electric grid as I have written. They estimate that it will only cost $13 per person. And my main purpose in bothering you with all this is to implore you to do whatever it takes to get our grid hardened; the grid for the whole US. There are two companies standing ready to do it.
I asked Dr. Pry what he intended to do when an EMP hits us. He said that he intended to die along with everyone else, but then said, with tears in his eyes, that he just hoped that his grandchildren and great grandchildren would be able to survive.
Dr. Pry has only 4 other people to whom he sends his most private emails. I have promised him that I would continue to pray for him. He knows that God has entrusted him with the task of alerting our nation to this peril, and he does feel the burden, all the time.
I encourage you to please pray for him, also. This threat is not some theory. It is for real!!!
If you would like to watch a wonderful, life changing movie, get yourself all prepared with the time to watch a full length movie, and then go to this site and be ready for a life changing experience. .…………….. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/english.html
On those pheasant hunts in the San Joaquin Valley in California General Curtis Lemay was my hunting partner and bunk mate. Many consider him the greatest worrier of the 20th Century. He showed us how to finally bomb the Germans effectively. He was then sent to the Pacific to very effectively destroy the Japanese when we were not harming them much at all before. In both of those occasions I am convinced that God woke him up in the middle of the night and put in his mind what specifically to do.
After the war he was sent back to Germany to direct the Berlin Airlift to thwart the Russians. Then he is credited with winning the Cold War by building the Strategic Air Command from scratch, the most destructive fighting force in world history.
In those hunts in California he related to me things that I really don’t think that he ever shared with most anyone else, even his wife. Following I will try to describe a few of those. I sent some of those things out to you before, but my plethora of folks in China who are reading this did not get to see them as many of you did.
General Lemay with his cutom made hunting clothes on ready to hunt.
Our Hunting Group with Me on the Left and Gen. Lemay on the Right
Lemay in Asia
As I have written before, historians say that General Curtis Lemay was one of the most important warriors that our country ever had. During WWII we were not putting any effective bombs on the Japanese, and that had to be done if we were ever going to defeat them. However, he showed us how to do it.
I have also written you about how so many people were desperately praying for our success against the Japanese, and how I believe God woke General Lemay up in the middle of the night and showed him what to do. However, I never showed you the details of that. Herewith are the details of things he shared about what he did in the Asia/Pacific Theatre:
Even though he was still in England, an inkling of what was to come was when Lemay was promoted over the heads of several colleagues at the age of 37 to become the youngest Major General in the US Army. However, he was soon sent back to the States.
Hap Arnold, the Commanding General of our Army Air Corps, was not much worried about the war in Europe at that point. He knew that we were going to have to try to defeat the Japanese. Other than the nuisance raid of Jimmy Doolittle, we had never put a bomb on them. He was convinced that unless we used strategic bombing like we were doing against the Germans, we could never defeat their fanatical troops on their home islands.
He was pinning all his hopes on the huge new airplane whose production he had been shepherding—–the B-29. He had already told Lemay that he expected Lemay to be the one to accomplish that task. However, this plane was so advanced and complicated that they were having all kinds of problems with it.
First, there had been a competition between Boeing and Douglas Aircraft for the contract. Boeing had been selected, but at Boeings’ plant in Nebraska there were all manner of delays and engineering changes.
The real answer was that it should take many years to perfect a plane like this, but Hap Arnold wanted it now to bomb Japan. And he was going to have it now, come “hell or high water”. Some of its chief designers had already been killed when it crashed with them on only its 2nd inaugural flight.
B-29 Rolled out for the first time
This plane weighed 135,000 pounds fully loaded and could carry 20,000 pounds of bombs. Its wingspan was half as long as a football field and it was a third as long as a football field.
It could fly at 32,000 feet for 4,100 miles without refueling.
It had supercharged air-cooled radial engines with 18 cylinders that produced over 3,700 hp each.
It carried a crew of 10 and was completely pressurized so that the crew did not need those cumbersome oxygen masks and fleece-lined flying suits.
It had two 50-cal. machine guns in each of four remotely controlled turrets, plus two 50-cal. machine guns and one 20mm cannon in its tail turret.
The Army ordered 1,600 of them after only its first flight, and eventually 3,970 were produced.
There were 900 engineering changes even after it had finished its test flights.
Its main problem was that its engines tended to swallow valves and then catch fire. Its magnesium crankcase burned with a fury that fliers had never seen before. In summation: It was years before it should have been put into service, but Hap Arnold was determined to have it bomb Japan now. In retrospect, he was absolutely right, but also in retrospect, more airmen lost their lives from its mechanical problems than from enemy fire.
Lemay had never spent any time with Hap Arnold, and knew little about him. Lemay assumed that they would have long discussions about the B-29 and how to operate from India where he was being sent first and how to finally fly out to China from where he was supposed to bomb the Japanese. They had no such discussions. The reason was that Arnold had no clue what the answer was to any of these things. He just ordered Lemay to go to India and make it all work.
Lemay had no experience with Arnold, so when he said no, that he would not do it, everyone in Washington was amazed at his effrontery. Lemay was not going to go without flying this B-29 first and understanding how its engines were put together.
Arnold and his staff finally relented and flew him to Nebraska to fly the plane and get to know its engines. He took his wife, Helen, and his daughter with him, since the whole transport plane was just for him. Through some fortuitous circumstances they found some great quarters right on the lake and enjoyed some wonderful and happy times.
He flew the plane and watched closely as they put its engines together. He spent a month mostly learning all of its problems.
Hap Arnold and the others in Washington were getting more and more anxious to put some bombs on the Japanese ability to wage war. It was time for Lemay to go to what they called the China/Burma/India Theater and make things happen. General Wolfe was there over Air Force operations, but was very ineffective as respects any results or consequence.
They assigned a B-29 for Lemay to fly there, but kept delaying and delaying getting it ready. Finally, he sent his wife and daughter back home to Ohio and boarded a Douglas C-54. He got to the American base at Kharagpur , India on August 29, 1944.
That is where all of his supplies were located, including his fuel and bombs. However, the problem was that any missions against the Japanese were to be from a base in China . It was 1,300 miles way over the high Himalayas . Everything would have to be flown into China over what was called “The Hump”.
The Chinese base for him was in Sichuan, Province. At that time the city was called Chengtu. Today it is called Chengdu . What happened there is still a highly emotional thing for the Chinese, even to this day. They needed to construct an airfield for the US bombers, but they had no machinery for such a task——no road graders, no steam rollers for packing down a runway, nothing but hand tools. But it had to be done.
70,000 people from that area came together with only their hoes, and picks, and shovels, and wheelbarrows. Just the clay and dirt would not support the weight of those huge planes. They meticulously arranged river rocks like they were bricks and covered them with clay. To pack them, they went up into the mountains and cut out huge cylinders of rock for rollers. It took several hundred people to pull one of them up and down the runways. They worked feverishly and when they finished, they had constructed the longest runway in the world at that time and the largest parking area for planes. To this day, the task that those, mostly poor farmers accomplished primarily with their bare hands is a deeply emotional thing for Chinese that I have visited with.
That runway is covered with concrete now, but I have landed on it many times. China now builds huge infrastructure projects to keep their economy humming. They only use a part of it presently, but Chengdu has one of the largest air terminals in the world. It is certainly the largest I have ever seen.
Lemay was totally chagrined at these kinds of logistics. They had other cargo planes to fly over the hump, but all the B-29s had to be used to haul cargo too. It took seven trips over the hump to haul enough fuel for just one plane to go on a combat mission. It took 1,000 trips before they were ready for their first mission from Chengdu.
Washington felt that Lemay was way too valuable to ever risk another combat mission and issued those orders. Lemay practically burned up the communication channels back to Washington . He maintained that a Commander could not lead a successful operation unless he led his men into combat. Finally, they agreed to let him go on one mission—–only one. So, of course, he chose the first one.
After studying all the possibilities, he decided to bomb the big Japanese steel plants at Anshan in Manchuria. It was a main supplier of steel for the Japanese war effort, but he chose it for a different reason. It was reported to be defended by the best Japanese fighter aircraft and pilots. He wanted to see how good their pilots were, their tactics, and he particularly wanted to see how good were the B-29’s power driven gun turrets and central fire-control system.
General Lemay’s B-29 Ready for Him to Board for the Raid on Anshan in Manchuria
On September 8, they were ready for the mission. Lemay ’s outfit was called the Twentieth Bomber Command. They had 115 B-29s at Chengdu. They were loaded and made ready for Anshan . Lemay took his place in the lead plane. All but 7 of the Superfortresses got off the ground that day and 95 reached the Anshan steel plants.
They were all watching for Japanese fighters. As they approached the target, they suddenly found them, airborne, in squadron formation, poised to attack. Lemay , accustomed to facing German fighter squadrons in almost identical situations, expected now to get some answers to those important questions in his mind. Not just how clever and relentless were the Japanese pilots, but how tough and resourceful were the men in his new outfit?
The Japanese squadron leader totally misjudged the B-29s’ speed. He never dreamed planes that big would be going that fast. By the time he got turned around he was never able to catch them. His spotter plane did make one pass, but did no damage. Also, contributing to his problems was that his fighters were designed to fight at 17,000 feet, but the B-29s were bombing from 25,000 feet.
They dropped 200 tons of bombs. Japanese antiaircraft fire perforated several planes, including Lemay’s. They lost only four planes on the mission. They managed to put much of the steel plant out of commission for at least a year, and the rest of it for at least 6 months.
Lemay never did explain to anyone why, but after their first mission to Anshan he grounded the entire 20th Air Force for an extended period of time. He set up intensive training groups for all the pilots, navigators, gunners, and maintenance crews. This was consistent with his almost paranoid emphasis on training that he had insisted on back in Germany.
Lemay managed to bomb two of the Japanese aircraft factories closest to China , but other than his logistical problems, he had the problem that there was almost no way to get weather information out of China . This was just intolerable and meant many aborted missions.
He was not a fan of the Communists, but he knew that Mao Zedong was not that far away down at Yenan from which he was fighting the Japanese and in a perfect position to send weather information. And even more important than the weather to Lemay was getting back the many pilots that were going down in northern China due to the B-29’s mechanical problems.
Lemay was awakened from his sleep again and had the unusual insight (that I am convinced that God Himself put into his head) that he should send a plane down to Mao and request his help. The next morning, he sent an officer from his communications section down to Yenan on a C-47 with all the communications equipment that he would need. He got a call back right away that Mao said he would cooperate.That afternoon, Lemay loaded another C-47 completely full of medical supplies and sent it down to Mao. They say that those Chinese doctors spent all night unloading all these medical supplies and shedding big tears the whole time. All they had up to that time were bandages and splints and alcohol. They had never even seen the new sulfa drugs we had that would keep a wounded soldier from getting an infection from his wounds.
When Lemay heard that; the next morning he sent down another plane with doctors to show the Chinese how to best use all those medical items. After that, he not only got much better weather information, but every downed pilot was escorted safely back all the way to Chengdu.
General Lemay with the Japanese Sword as a Gift of Gratitude3 from Mao Zedong
Last year, some Chinese friends took me way up to Mao’s mountain hideout at Yenan. Because of its location in those mountains, I observed that it would be almost impossible to attack it successfully. I was allowed to go in and see Mao’s rooms, his bed, and even his little office. It was all very sparse, even the mostly bamboo buildings.
It was nothing like his sumptuous residence on the lake in Hangzhou after he took over all of mainland China and was absolute dictator. I have visited that residence too and can assure you it is not sparse like his hideout at Yenan.
By now, the US Marines had captured the Mariana Islands. They had not yet taken Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but they immediately began constructing airports on Tinian, Guam, and Saipan . There were still some Japanese hiding out and fighting, but just as soon as these fields were available, B-29s arrived and under General Hansell the 21st Air Force was formed there.
Yes, the B-29s were pressurized. Its engines were turbo-supercharged. Its guns were mechanized. And it was capable of operating at 35,000 feet, above the effective altitude of Japanese flak and the best Japanese fighters. But it took twenty-three tons of gasoline to get that high and all the way to Tokyo and back. That limited them to onky three tons of bombs per plane.
Adding to that, and what no one had ever known before, was that some of the strongest jet-stream winds in the world were over the Japanese islands. Much of the time they were over 200 mph and shifted in different directions. This made precision bombing almost impossible.
On every mission that he tried, Gen. Hansell was losing 3 to 4 planes in the Pacific between Japan and the Marianna’s due to mechanical problems and achieving very little results. Hap Arnold and the other generals did not know the answers to all this, but they knew what they needed to do——get Lemay there and in charge.
On orders, he packed-up the 20th Air Force and moved to the Marianna’s. They merged the 20th and the 21st together into the largest bomber force in history. Tinian became the largest airfield in the world as respects numbers of planes.
There were still no adequate quarters there. Lemay slept in a tent with the rest of the guys for awhile. He also started his intensive training of all these new pilots, and navigators, and gunners, and ground crews. He got the whole operation into much better shape, but because of the problems with the jet-streams over Japan , his results were not much better that General Hansell’s.
As was usual with him, he did not believe in spending all this money and enormous effort without getting results. And they were not getting the desired results. At that point in the campaign the Navy brass asked Lemay to fly out and meet with them. They wanted to know if he thought it was necessary to take Iwo Jima, the little volcanic island that lay about half-way between Japan and the Marianna’s. His answer was an emphatic, “Yes”. He needed it for landing B-29s that could not make it back to the Marianna’s, and for a base for fighter planes to protect his bombers over Japan, and for air-sea rescue units to pluck his crews out of the Pacific when their planes went down near there.
He did help with bombing Iwo Jima a little in preparation for the landing, but at that time the Navy was much more interested in what they called Task Force 58. They were planning on sending this huge task force right up to the Japanese mainland and attacking Tokyo proper with their carrier planes. They promised Marine general, Howlin’ Mad” Smith that they would shell Iwo for ten days prior to its invasion. They shelled for only 3 days and he really became “Howlin’ Mad, and rightly so. He later wrote that “ Iwo Jima cost too much” because of the Navy’s preoccupation with their Task Force 58.
The Navy did send two-hundred plus ships for Task Force 58. They flew 2,074 sorties against Tokyo over three days, and dropped 513 tons of bombs and rockets. They also destroyed 415 Japanese planes with a loss of 102 of their own 1,091 planes.
On those same three days, an average of 167 B-29s flew 439 sorties and dropped a total of 1,220 tons of bombs (two-and-a-half times as much as the task force) on the Japanese Mainland. The B-29s shot down only 46 planes but lost only 5 of their own.
Meanwhile, Hap Arnold and Washington were boiling for better results against Japanese war-making infrastructure. Admiral Nimitz wanted to bring the 20th/21st Air Force under his control. And General McArthur of the Army, who was like and emperor looking for an empire, wanted it under his control.
With all the prayers being offered up about this war by Christians and non-Christians across the free world, I firmly believe that God was giving Lemay extraordinary help and insight. After my visits and correspondence with him, I just know that this is true. And at this particular moment in the war effort, I am confident that God’s Spirit Power directly intervened.
The President and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had already conclusively determined that Mainland Japan would be invaded. The estimate was that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 US service men would die from what would be absolutely fanatical Japanese resistance. Lemay knew that too, and he felt deeply that he had to do something to prevent this carnage, that it was his personal responsibility.
Suddenly, on a particular night on Guam he was waked up in the middle of the night just like he was in Germany . Clearly in his mind was the answer——a simple answer that no one had thought of. The Japanese antiaircraft shells all had fuses to explode at 21,000 feet and up. It would take two to three weeks to change those fuses. He could bomb at low levels for at least that length of time without the big flak shells. They would just whiz right on by.
He had been advised that at low levels the Japanese short range guns would shoot down all his planes if he ever tried, but it was clearly in his mind that this was not true. I just know that God was showing him that, and that he would have at least 3 weeks before the Japanese could install short range antiaircraft guns of any consequence and change those fuses.
Japan had intentionally decentralized 90% of its war related production into small subcontractor workshops placed in civilian districts. It made the Japanese war industry largely immune from conventional precision bombing with high explosives, all spread out and scattered among the civilian residences. Also, because of the threat of earthquakes all these civilian districts were made of wood and bamboo, not brick or stone.
General Lemay Giving the Briefing for Bombing Tokyo
When Lemay went into the briefing room and announced that tonight the B-29s were going to bomb Tokyo from between 5,000 and 6,000 feet, once again the guys wrote home: “Mama, I ain’t coming home!”
What really amazed them was when Lemay informed them that all guns and munitions and gun crews would be taken off the planes to make it possible to carry more incendiaries. The gunners wanted to fly anyway to keep their crews together, but they were required to stay home.
So on the night of March 9, 325 B-29’s were loaded with M-47 incendiary clusters, magnesium bombs, white phosphorus bombs, and napalm.
At just after midnight on March10 the pathfinders laid a huge, flaming X across that section of Tokyo where all those subcontractor workshops were located, making the parts for new aircraft. The main force followed and dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries.
They created the greatest fire storm in history.
Lemay was out on the flight line the next morning to meet General Powers; who was leading the mission, upon his return. As instructed, Powers was to climb to 10,000 feet after releasing his bombs. He said at first there was a sprinkling of fires throughout the target area. Then these fires grew until they merged into one great conflagration. By the time Powers turned for home, the center of Tokyo was an inferno.
Photos the next day showed that at least fifteen square miles of Tokyo had been obliterated. Official Japanese figures showed that there were 84,000 fatalities and 41,000 were badly injured. More than half the fatalities resulted from suffocation when the fire sucked all the oxygen up into the sky. A million people were left homeless and 267,200 buildings were destroyed. But the most important thing was that a great part of Japan ’s ability to make war was destroyed, especially in this area for making parts to construct aircraft.
Between March 1945 and August 1945 the B-29s destroyed over 40% of the built-up areas of 66 more Japanese cities the same way. The dropping of the two atomic bombs were under Lemay’s supervision, and people say they were the reason for Japan ’s surrender. I am sure that helped, but I am convinced that what happened to Tokyo and the 66 other cities was the main reason for all those hundreds of thousands of US service men not having to die.
Lemay was greatly criticized and castigated for killing so many civilians.
When I asked him about that here is what he told me: “When Japan surrendered and MacArthur flew in to take over its occupation, I was in the 2nd plane right behind him. On the way to the Occupation Headquarters I asked our driver to take me through that part of Tokyo that had been burned on the early morning if March 10. What I saw was that the only thing still standing were all those drill presses, lathes, and other machines for making aircraft parts. When I saw that, I felt vindicated.”
On those pheasant hunts in the San Joaquin Valley in California General Curtis Lemay was my hunting partner and bunk mate. Many consider him the greatest worrier of the 20th Century. He showed us how to finally bomb the Germans effectively. He was then sent to the Pacific to very effectively destroy the Japanese when we were not harming them much at all before. In both of those occasions I am convinced that God woke him up in the middle of the night and put in his mind what specifically to do.
After the war he was sent back to Germany to direct the Berlin Airlift to thwart the Russians. Then he is credited with winning the Cold War by building the Strategic Air Command from scratch, the most destructive fighting force in world history.
In those hunts in California he related to me things that I really don’t think that he ever shared with most anyone else, even his wife. Following I will try to describe a few of those. I sent some of those things out to you before, but my plethora of folks in China who are reading this did not get to see them as many of you did.
General Lemay with his custom made hunting clothes on ready to hunt.
Our Hunting Group with Me on the Left and Gen. Lemay on the Right
Our most accurate historians say that General Curtis Lemay was one of the most famous and important warriors that our country ever had. During WWII we were not putting any effective bombs on the Germans, that had to be done if we were ever going to defeat them until he showed us how to do it.
In the Pacific we were not putting any damage on the Japanese that had to be done if we were ever going to defeat them until he showed us how to do it. And at one point the Russians were a grave threat to us. They were not afraid of our President or our other generals, be they were deathly afraid of General Leman and the Strategic Air Command that he built and headed. Without him we may all be speaking German or Japanese or Russian today.
I have written you before how he was my hunting partner and bunk-mate on those pheasant hunts in the San Juaquin Valley in California. He told me things that I don’t think he had ever shared with most anyone else.
The General Bringing His Birds to Show Me
I have also written you about how so many people were desperately praying for our success against the Germans, and how I believe God woke General Lemay up in the middle of the night and showed him what to do. However, I never showed you the details of that. Herewith are those details and their results if you care to know. I find them fascinating:
Lemay was a good pilot, but he also became the best navigator that the Army Air Corps had.
They got the first B-17 in January 1936 at Langley Field, Virginia , but it was 1938 before they got production models to effectively train in. The US wanted to show off this long-range bomber to the world. The folks in Washington were also concerned about the growing influence of Germany and Italy in South America . Three Italian bombers, commanded by Bruno Mussolini, the youngest son of the Italian dictator had just visited Brazil.
It was decided to send 6 B-17’s all the way from Langley Field to Buenos Aires, Argentina . They wanted Curtis Lemay to be the Chief Navigator for this 11,952-mile trip. He said that they had no aircraft maps of South America . He said that he went by National Geographic’s Office and got some of their maps. That is all he had for navigation of this flight. They took off on February 16, 1938, and refueled in Miami, Panama, and Lima, Peru . They landed at the El Palomar Military Air Base in Buenos Aires on February 27. Three days later they provided a fly-over for the inauguration of President Roberto Ariz.
The people there had never heard anything like roar of those Cyclone-9 engines which provided 22,500 horsepower to each of the 6 planes.
Just after this flight the US Army Air Corps was in a big fight with the US Navy. The Army said their new long-range planes could provide protection to the US coasts. The Navy said that was impossible. So, a test was set up. The Air Corps was supposed to send a flight of B-17’s way off the coast of California and intercept the Battleship Utah in misty conditions with very low cloud cover. The whole success or failure of the mission was up to the Chief Navigator, Curtis Lemay. Even after being given the wrong coordinates on purpose by the Navy, Lemay found the ship and it was hit with three water bombs, much to the consternation of the US Navy.
Later, in a second test, Lemay found the Italian Liner Rex, 610 miles off the Atlantic coast. Still, the Navy was never convinced.
At Langley, Lemay formed the 305th Bomber Group. It was now just before Pearl Harbor. His recruits were subjected to relentless training, as Lemay believed that training was the key to saving their lives. “You train as you fight” was one of his cardinal rules. It expressed his belief that, in the chaos, stress, and confusion of combat (aerial or otherwise), troops or airmen would perform successfully only if their individual acts were second-nature, performed nearly instinctively due to repetitive training. Throughout his career, Lemay was widely and fondly known among his troops as “Old Iron Pants”, mostly because he demanded training way beyond that of any other commander. His demands for such training pervaded his whole military career.
After Pearl Harbor, he was ordered to England. He was now a Major and successfully got his 305th Group across the Atlantic and joined the 3rd Air Division of the 8th Air Force. Because of his dedication to training, he was later made Commander of the 3rd Air Division.
Those B-17’s were called Flying Fortresses because they had so many defensive guns, but Lemay was amazed that the gunners he was getting from the States had so little training, that “they just couldn’t hit anything”. He was criticized for using an inordinate amount of fuel for taking them on so many training flights to teach them how to shoot.
Lemay had never been in combat, so he was very intent on quizzing the commanders who had been on the few bombing missions that had been flown over France at that point in the conflict. They all told him the same thing: That those German 88mm’s were so formidable as anti-aircraft weapons that you had to fly a zigzag pattern over the target or everyone would be shot down from the flak, though many were shot down anyway. They all told him that a plane must not fly more than 10 seconds in one direction without changing direction. This was the operating procedure for all bombers in the 8th Air Force.
Lemay and his group flew several missions. He was lead pilot on every raid. However, it was just overwhelming consternation to him that the post raid photos showed that they were just not hitting anything. They were spending all that fuel and equipment and losing planes and getting guys killed, and so very few of their bombs were hitting the target.
They had that amazing new Norden Bombsight. US Airmen had to take an oath that they would guard it with their very life from falling into enemy hands. We did not even let the English have access to it for the same reason. It had a system that allowed it to directly measure the aircraft’s ground speed and direction, which older bombsights could only estimate with lengthy in-flight procedures. The Norden further improved on older designs by using an analog computer that constantly calculated the bomb’s impact point based on current flight conditions, and an autopilot that let it react quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects. These features seemed to promise unprecedented accuracy, and they did in practice. But if you had to zigzag every 10 seconds, all that wonderful design was of little use.
General Lemay deeply believed that it was going to take success with strategic bombing of Germany to degrade their ability to wage war if we were ever going to defeat them. I am sure he was correct, too. The Germans were right on the verge of completing jet planes that could wipe out anything we had. They were also perfecting amazing rockets and were dangerously close to perfecting atomic bombs.
What happened next is why I have asked you to wade through all this history with me. I have already mentioned that more prayers were being offered up to God concerning WWII than any event at that point in human history. We can look back and see how those prayers were answered over and over, but here is what I consider to be one of the most important answers for its impact on the war in Europe.
Lemay was brooding on all this, when suddenly he was bolted from his sleep in the middle of the night. There, clearly in his mind was the answer, but it was so radical that he had to prove it. He never could explain even to himself why he had taken his old ROTC artillery manual from Ohio State with him all the way to England in his footlocker. He immediately got it out. It had been used by his old ROTC instructor there. He had been an artillery officer in WWI. He had drilled into Lemay and his fellow students the fundamentals of artillery warfare. The book had been written for French 75mm shells, but Lemay knew he could adapt it for the German 88’s.
He spent the rest of the night calculating the distance the 88 shell would have to travel to reach a B-17, the size of a B-17 at that distance, how fast the Germans were able to load the artillery piece with the next shell and a host of other parameters. He checked and rechecked his calculations and concluded that it would take 372 shells being fired to hit a plane if it were flying straight-in to the target without deviating at all. He knew, and I am convinced that God showed him that those were acceptable odds.
At the briefing the next morning of the 305th in their briefing room the guys were all assembled after their breakfast of eggs and spam and much black coffee. The back door opened, there was the “ten shun”. They all jumped to their feet, and “Old Iron Pants” walked up to the front. There was the weather report, and the maps of their target that day were put up. They were to hit the German submarine pens and the rail yards at St. Nazaire.
Then Lemay dropped the big one on them: They were to fly straight in from the first sighting of the target until all bombs were released. No one was to deviate the slightest bit.
Lemay had always encouraged his crews to speak up in a briefing if they felt it imperative to do so. At this point he rather wished he hadn’t allowed it, for all manner of commotion erupted. One pilot even stood up and said: “Sir, it just can’t be done!” Lemay informed them that it would be done, and that he would be flying the lead plane. That quieted things down, if he had that much conviction in his calculations to fly lead; but many guys wrote home: “Mama, I ain’t coming home!”
With no more talk, the men of the 305th got into their planes and prepared to take off. Twenty fortresses of the group took off. Four turned back because of mechanical problems and 16 continued on to the target, which wasn’t that bad in those days.
They got into an even tighter box formation as they neared St. Nazaire. For weeks and weeks Lemay had been having them practice a special box formation, flying very tightly together so that they would be protecting each other from enemy fighters. The thought of sending men in to die had been weighing more and more heavily on their commander. He devised the tight box formation with its resulting overlapping fire to protect them from the German ME-109s and the open engine FW-190s. These fighters used either 7.92mm MG machine guns or 20mm MG FF cannon, depending on the pilot’s preference. All were lethal to bombers but facing this tight box formation with all its overlapping firepower was something the German pilots had not faced before. If they could find a straggler that had drifted out of the formation, they pounced on it.
Eventually the entire 8th Air Force adopted Lemay ’s box formation.
As St. Nazaire came into sight, Lemay banked his plane into a straight, steady course and leveled his wings. When he looked around at the rest of the group, not a single plane wavered, even as the flak came up to meet them. The nasty little black clouds began to burst above, below, and among them. Later, when asked, Lemay said that after working out the artillery problem the flak did not particularly bother him, “But I certainly didn’t care for those flickering machine guns coming straight at me.”
He was making an unprecedented demand today, not only upon himself but on the other men in his group, when he insisted that all of them look into the muzzles of those machine guns and press forward with no evasive action and the flak of the German 88’s. Not every man is capable of such cool courage, and he knew it.
The flak was all around them at 21,000 feet, but they continued straight and level for 7 minutes when the bombardiers took over and adjusted their bomb sights. At 1:40 PM the first bombs fell. Two minutes later they were beyond the target.
Lemay’s plane was hit by two pieces of shrapnel and two guys in the back slightly injured. Five other planes reported being hit, but none went down. Six German fighters made passes at them but moved on after doing only minor damage. All 16 continued back toward base with no stragglers.
Lemay immediately summoned the rookie bombardier and asked how he had done. “I put bombs on the target. It was a good run, Boss”, he said. “Are you sure of that?” Lemay asked. “I am sure, but I could have done even better if it weren’t for those white clouds. They kind of got in the way.” Though he didn’t know it, those white clouds were from the flak bursts. There wasn’t a regular cloud in the sky that day.
All the 305th planes got back safely, told stories, and turned in their strike photos. It was two days before the intelligence officers of the 8th Air Force could analyze everything and turn in their mission report. The 305th had put twice as many bombs on target as any other bomber group and none of their planes had been shot down.
Within three weeks, every group in the Eighth Air Force was flying straight-and-level bomb runs, taking no evasive action over the targets.
After several more raids Air Force intelligence concluded that: The 305th was attracting fewer fighter attacks than other groups. They were using more ammunition than other groups but shooting down fewer German planes.
They had a much lower loss rate than other groups.
When asked for his impressions of why by the intelligence section, he gave these answers. Lemay said: 1. The 305th usually had more ships in the air than other groups, giving greater protection. 2. His stagger box formation gave them more firepower against an approaching enemy. 3. They were shooting at longer ranges. Lemay had decided that if fighters were welcomed by bullets before they even came close, they were not as likely to come close.
By now the 8th Air Force had doubled in size with the addition of new Groups from the US. Ira Eaker, still head of the 8th, was becoming anxious to bomb Germany, but the weather there remained dismal.
They bombed across France, even the airport at Paris where Lindbergh had landed. On July 17, 1943 they entered Germany for the first time in hopes of bombing the submarine plants at Hamburg, but the clouds were too thick to find the target. The clouds over Germany continued and continued.
Finally on July 24, Fred Anderson, the new head of Bomber Command became so disgusted with waiting that he decided to bomb elsewhere. He assembled 324 Fortresses, the largest group to go on a mission up to that time and sent them to German occupied Norway. They bombed the ports that the Germans were using and hit quite a few German ships and port facilities, though several of their targets were covered by clouds. But then the clouds cleared over Germany.
Immediately Eaker, still over the 8th Air Force, started what became known as Blitz Week. The 8th went on 6 missions in 7 days. On July 25 Andersen sent planes to Kiel, Hamburg, and Warnamunde, but the clouds were too thick there. Lemay’s planes found a hole in the clouds and hit their secondary target of Rostock with impressive results. This was mostly due to Lemay ’s relentless drilling of his navigators’ and bombardiers’ studying of their targets before-hand.
By then the Germans had transferred some of their best fighter squadrons back from the Eastern Front to oppose the bombers. On this raid they shot down 19 fortresses and many more on the rest of Blitz Week. By the end of the week the 8th Air Force had lost 100 bombers and over 1,000 men, but Lemay ’s 3rd had hit important targets. They knocked out rail yards, a rubber factory, and on July 30 they dropped 100 tons of bombs on the Focke-Wulf components factory at Kassel that shut it down for over a month.
Mostly because of Blitz Week the 8th Air Force crewmen suffered 75 emotional breakdowns in July of 1943. The stress of battle was bad enough, but their planes were not pressurized. The waist gunners had to have large open sections in the side of the plane through which to fire their 50 calibers. At 20,000 feet and above the temperature was 30 to 50 degrees below zero. Their oxygen masks would freeze up and cut off the oxygen supply, and they would not realize it until it was too late. Many times the plane’s oxygen system would be hit or just malfunction. They did not dare descend to a lower altitude so they could breath, for leaving the formation spelled certain death from fighters and flak.
Because of his exceptional leadership ability and all he added to the bombing campaign against the Germans, Lemay was asked to take over the whole 3rd Air Division of the 8th Air Force. This task called for him to be a Brigadier General, but he remained a Colonel for way longer than he should have. He was doing the work of a General but did not have the rank. When he finally got his General’s star, he remarked to his aids: “Well, it is about time.”
Because the P-47 fighters could not go very far with the B-17’s for protection, the bombers suffered horrendous losses. One of the reasons was that the fighters could not get auxiliary wing tanks. Lemay became furious when he found that one of the reasons the fighters did not get them was that Walter Reuther, who was head of the United Auto Workers Union and founder of the AFL-CIO and a big Civil Rights worker, and Women’s Rights worker was holding up their production back in the States. It is estimated that hundreds of bomber crews died because of it.
Lemay and some of the other generals confronted the head of the 8th’s Fighter Command. Their men were dying from lack of fighter support even on missions so short that wing tanks were not needed. What really rankled him was the Fighter Command’s policy of having one of the good fighter planes escort any fighter back to base that was having engine trouble. Lemay had previously been a fighter pilot for 8 years. He had no patience for such a policy when the good plane was so needed to protect his bombers. He informed Fighter Command that when one of his bombers had engine trouble, it had to fly back to base on its own. He walked out; but soon, because of his new-found influence with Hap Arnold back in Washington there was a new commander for Fighter Command.
Lemay did not go on any of the missions on Blitz Week. Ira Eaker was saving him to command something much more special. They wanted to make a two-pronged attack against the German’s big plant for making the Messerschmitt 109 at Regensburg on the Danube River and the Focke-Wulf 190 plant at Wiener Neustadt in eastern Austria. This was to be a double attack to spread the German fighters out more thinly. Also, to make them even more thin, they wanted to simultaneously hit the big ball bearing plant at Schweinfurt which was close to Regensburg .
Ira Eaker wanted Lemay to lead the attack against the Messerschmitt plant, while General Carl Spaatz, Commander of the Fifteenth Air Force in north Africa would hit the Focke-Wulf plant. At the same time General Bob Williams, commander of the First Division of the 8th Air Force was to hit the ball bearing plant at Schweinfurt . However, this was no ordinary mission for Lemay . After dropping his bombs at Regensburg they wanted him to fly on across the Alps to north Africa, refuel, resupply, and fly back across Germany and bomb a target there the next day. Since these targets were so far across Germany and were sure to be very well defended, this was going to be a dangerous mission.
The B-17’s could carry enough fuel to safely do this, but it was quite unusual. In preparation, Lemay flew to Africa and met with Col. Lauris Norstad who Hap Arnold considered one of the smartest men in the Air Force. He assured Lemay that the best base to land his B-17’s was at Telergma (about 60 miles inland from Tunis ). He assured Lemay : “Telergma is your field. It’s both a depot and a combat field. There you’ll have supplies, extra mechanics—-everything you need. That’s the place to land. You can get well serviced there. All the parts you need. All the maintenance people and support.”
Lemay left Norstad feeling confident about everything but the weather. Maybe he should have gone to Telergma to see for himself, but Norstad had such a good reputation that he just trusted him.
When he got back to England his bomb groups were getting ready for the special mission, though they did not know its details yet. At that time Lemay ’s Third Division consisted of Bomber Groups——94th, 95th, 96th, 100th, 385th, 388th, and 390th.
In August the weather remained bad across Germany . By August 13 General Spaatz in Africa was tired of waiting for the Eighth to move against Regensburg . That day he sent his heavy bombers (including 3 B-24 groups) against the FW-190 plant at Wiener Neustadt, thus scrapping the two-pronged mission as it had been originally planned.
However, Eaker still planned his two-pronged attack against Schweinfurt . Clustered around the railroad yards of this small eastern Bavarian city were five huge factories which provided almost two-thirds of Germany ’s ball and roller bearings. At that time it was thought that the whole German war effort depended on these bearings.
Finally, the orders came for their mission the next day. At the briefing that evening, Lemay told his men to take rations for two days and that they would probably be sleeping on the ground for one or two nights. The men were very quiet. They knew that this was to be the 8th’s biggest, and the deepest penetration into Germany against two targets that were sure to be as well defended as any in the Third Reich.
Next morning the clouds were low and getting lower as Lemay rolled out of his bunk at three o’clock on August 17. And when the zero hour for takeoff approached the low clouds had reached the ground into a thick fog. Lemay figured that if men would escort the planes to the runway with flashlights, they could find their way to the end of the runway and take off.
The approval finally came and the props began to turn. They all got off and got through into the blue sky. Then began the huge job of assembling. The people on the ground could hear the noise of the roaring B-17’s and the Germans with their sophisticated listening devices would know that they were coming; they just did not know where.
The Ninety-sixth Bomb Group was to fly lead, and Lemay was the lead plane in that group. The assembly went smoothly and soon the Third was ready to head toward the Continent, but where were the eighteen squadrons of American Thunderbolts and the sixteen squadrons of British Spitfire fighters scheduled to escort them at least as far as Holland . And where was the First Division, which by now should have been assembling its 230 planes for its mission to Schweinfurt . If Lemay ’s Third Division was to act as a decoy as planned, the First would have to follow in 30 minutes.
Lemay got on the radio to Anderson at Bomber Command and asked what was wrong. He was informed that they could not get off the ground because of the low clouds. He was furious. He had trained his people how to do that. Why hadn’t the others been trained? Thought was given to scrapping everything, but that would have been bad for morale, and would involve all that assembling on another day.
Just then, it did not matter. The radio went dead in Lemay ’s plane. No order to return could be given.
General Lemay never told me if it actually went dead on its own, of if he just turned it off. Anyway, the whole Third Division turned east to the continent. They had used up so much fuel circling and waiting that they had to abort or go now if they were going to drop their bombs and reach Africa.
Lt. Col. Beirne Lay, a member of Ira Eaker’s staff went along as an observer and to get some combat experience. He described what happened from one of the rear-most planes where he was riding. He said that as they approached Belgium about seventeen minutes after the Fortresses crossed the coast of the Continent, radial engine fighters approached. He hoped at first that they were the radial engine Thunderbolts, but no such luck. They were a hoard of FW-190s and bullet spitting ME-109s.
An exit door from one of the forward B-17s came hurtling through the formation with a man, who had apparently been sucked out with it. He had his knees tucked up and was just spinning over and over like a diver doing a triple summersault.
One of the fortresses fell gradually out of formation and drifted down to the right, and then moments later disintegrated in one giant explosion. The fighters kept pressing. In his rear plane he said they were flying through a hail of exit doors, tail assembles all manner of debris and partially opened parachutes.
He said that he watched one plane that was completely engulfed in flames but kept flying. He described how only the co-pilot got out through breaking his window. Lay said he crawled out but could not get through with his parachute on. He reached back, retrieved his chute and hooked his arms through it, and jumped off the plane. He hit the rear horizontal stabilizer and his chute never opened.
Lay said two FW-190s hurtled through the formation at a closing speed of five hundred miles per hour—-so fast that one of them nicked a pair of B-17s in passing. Smoke trailed from the wings of the bombers, but they stayed in formation. The 190 was not so fortunate. Smoke was trailing from its nose, and metal was flying from its wing as it plunged downward.
“After we had been under attack for a solid hour,” Lay reported“, it appeared certain that the One-hundredth Group that I was in was faced with annihilation. Seven of our group had been shot down, the sky was still full of fighters and more were coming up. And we still had 35 more minutes before we reached the target. I had long since mentally accepted the fact of death.”
German fighters were swarming all over the armada but concentrating on the battered and more vulnerable rear combat wings. Twin-engine ME-110s appeared on the scene to help the other fighters. They fired rockets from a distance and tried a new tactic of dropping bombs from above to explode in the midst of the fortresses. Col. Lay’s group had now lost 15 planes.
They finally reached the Initial Point from which they would begin their bomb run. Despite the onslaught, Lemay had led his division to the target. At 11:45 Lt. Dunstan Abel, the bombardier in Lemay ’s plane, dropped his load of explosives and incendiaries directly on the factorys’ buildings, and the rest of the planes in the group released on his cue. Lemay ’s task force dropped 303 tons of bombs on the Messerschmitt plant in what proved later to be one of the most accurate bombardments of the war.
The fighters had disappeared as they approached the target; probably from running short of fuel. They continued on toward the Brenner Pass in the alps, but 15 ME-110s and Junkers-88s caught up with them and they lost three more planes.
They formed up at a rally point south of the Alps and headed toward Africa. They had all suffered damage, but two fortresses were so badly damaged that they would never reach Africa . They headed into Switzerland for sanctuary as the others continued on.
The B-17s moved on down the boot of Italy . At an airbase near Verona there were fighters on the ground, but they must have been Italian. They did not come up to attack.
As they left the southern tip of Italy they went into a gradual, gliding descent to save gas. They hit the African coast about 18 miles off course but found Telergma. 45 planes landed one behind the other at the shortest possible intervals. Others landed on two desolate fields right on the coast. They were running out of fuel from having circled so long over England . Four could not even make those two fields on the coast. They landed in wheat fields and dry lake beds. Another four did not even make the coast and ditched in the Mediterranean . Two of their crews were saved by air-sea rescue units. The other two were never heard from again.
Much to his consternation, Lemay found nothing was as Telergma had been described to him. There were no parts depots. There was not a single mechanic there. There were bombs and there was gasoline in 55-gallon barrels, but almost nothing else.
Lemay was still fuming about this when Lt. Col. Beirne Lay arrived with the twelve remaining planes of the rearmost One-hundredth Group which had somehow managed to survive. Lay, who had just flown through Armageddon, and had watched countless Fortresses fall, including nine from the One-hundredth alone was glad to just be on the ground again and alive.
One of those B-17s “all shot to pieces” but Still flying
Lemay, knowing he was expected to bomb the next day sent a message back to Eaker in England with a preliminary report of his task force’s condition. By the time Eaker received Lemay’s message, he already knew about the Schweinfurt losses of the other armada. Though the damage to the vital German ball bearing plants had been as great as he had hoped; 36 of the 230 fortresses in Gen. Bob William’s First Division taskforce had been shot down. Added to Lemay ’s loss of 24, this brought the day’s toll to a disastrous 60, without counting the many planes that were so badly damaged they might never fly again. He knew the mission was dangerous, but he never expected to break a record.
Eaker immediately flew to Africa to assess the situation. What he found absolutely amazed him. Lemay had set up a headquarters tent and had his air crews scavenging the parts from the planes that were too damaged to ever fly again and repairing the other planes. Not a single man in the air crews was even close to a being a qualified mechanic except for one—– Lemay himself. He was directing everything for the repair job.
It took four days to refuel from those 55-gallon drums.
Eaker insisted that they fly home on a safe route to avoid any more losses, but Lemay was determined to complete his mission.
The best estimate is that of the 145 B-17s with which Lemay left England for Regensburg and Africa , at least half were either lost or would never fly another mission. Never-the-less on August 24, most of the survivors “returned proudly across France and in broad daylight”, dropped 144 tons of bombs on the German-held air base at Bordeaux.
Lemay was sent back to the States to boost morale and sell war bonds. However, he got back to England as quickly as possible. And on his return, he found that many more bombers had arrived and that plans were being made for the Normandy Invasion on the Continent. Yet, one more change had happened.
The long-range P-51 Mustang was coming to England, squadron after squadron, to escort the B-17s all the way to their targets and back. These slender, fast, durable and deadly fighters, equipped now with Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, brought a dramatic change to the American’s daylight bombing effort. When Hermann Goering, Hitler’s Air Force Chief was captured after the war, he was asked when he knew they had lost the war. His immediate answer: “When those red-nosed fighters appeared all the way over to Berlin .”
For the last 20 years I have presented the Gospel to each new youth at the highly secure prison for the kids ages 13 to 19 at Gainesville, Texas. It is the first time that most any of them have stopped “running on the streets” and had the time to think about their life. Most every one made a decision to make God part of their life. After our hour+ together I would write each one a letter. As a result I corresponded more with many of them. And in each letter I would enclose a group of short stories or poems. They really liked them, especially those with an emotional message.You probably would not believe how many locked-up prison boys have loved theses little stories, and read them over and over.
In my soon to be published book I enclosed a long list of those short stories in the Appendix. Since the prison boys liked them so much, I thought you may like to see some of them. So, here is a 27th group of them for you. And you are welcome to share them with others.
Ron
WRONG E-MAIL ADDRESS
A couple from Minneapolis decided to go to Florida to thaw out during one particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the very same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier.
Because of hectic activities, it was difficult to coordinate their travel schedules. So, the husband left Minnesota and flew to Florida on Thursday, with his wife flying down the following day.
The husband checked into the hotel. There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an e-mail to his wife.
However, he accidentally left out one letter in her e-mail address, and without realizing his error, he sent the e-mail.
Meanwhile…..somewhere in Houston, a widow had just returned home from her husband’s funeral. He was a minister of many years who was called home to glory following a sudden heart attack The widow decided to check her e-mail, expecting messages from relatives and friends.
After reading the first message, she fainted. The widow’s son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen which read:
To: My Loving Wife
Subject: I’ve Arrived
Date: Jan 8, 2015
I know you’re surprised to hear from me.
They have computers here now and you are allowed to send e-mails to your loved ones.
I’ve just arrived and have been checked in.
I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow.
Looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.
P.S. Sure is hot down here!
You Are Beautiful
You are beautiful. . .
It’s a phrase that my mother used a lot.
I used to wonder, “How in the world can Mother call them beautiful?”
I am a logical, statistical man. I call things as I see them. I didn’t always see beauty.
My mother would tell people this with an enthusiasm they could feel. She was genuine. She wasn’t telling them they were beautiful to get something from them. Most of the time, they were trying to get something from her.
I wondered for years what was wrong with Mother’s perception and vision. Couldn’t she see that all of the people she called beautiful, weren’t beautiful?
You were beautiful only if you had a certain figure and face that was classed as beautiful by the laws of the world and glamour. Yet when my mother spoke, people smiled as though Glamour magazine had listed them as one of the beautiful people of the year.
It took me years to finally understand my mother’s vision and the phrase, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” My mother had a spirit that could see the beauty in every person.
Most only look on the outside and then compare what they see with the standards the world has given them. That was what I was doing.
Today when you leave your house, carefully look at the first person whom you see and notice how beautiful they are.
They may be balding, fat, wrinkled, pimply, or any of the other things the world frowns upon as beauty.
Look at them closely and look for the beauty. If you really look, you’ll see it.
I didn’t believe that at first until I tried it. Sure enough, as I stared and opened another set of eyes, I was able to see the beauty in every person. No matter how rough or worn a person looked, each pain etched line held a glimpse of beauty.
You just had to look for the beauty. It’s there.
When you get a chance today, look hard at each person. You will start to see the beauty of every human who you didn’t know existed. Trust me and try this. If you sincerely look, you will see it.
When you get home after seeing the beauty in faces you see, look in the mirror.
You are beautiful.
Thank you mama for all of the beauty that you have not only seen, but added.
You’re Fired!
“You’re fired.” Some people let the phrase get to them. Others use it as a launching pad to superstardom. In his book, “We’re Fired…and It’s the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us,” Harvey Mackay brings us some inspirational stories of rejects turned-celebrities. Turns out the road to fame isn’t so smooth.
Elvis Presley The King got fired from a music studio in 1954. He was told, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. Go back and drive a truck.” Tell that to the thousands of Elvis impersonators who sing his tunes decades after his death.
Walt Disney Disney was fired from a newspaper for lack of ideas. The Walt Disney Company, with its animated movies, theme parks, television stations and more, is now a multibillion-dollar empire.
Joanne Kathleen (a.k.a. J.K.) Rowling The author of the mega-popular Harry Potter books was canned from a secretarial job after she got caught using the company computer to write creative stories. She used her severance pay to write Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, using grant money to finish it after she ran out of cash. The Harry Potter series became a global craze and Rowling became a billionaire.
Larry King Before he ruled CNN, Larry King wrote a column for the Miami Herald. The Herald’s editor fired him for being too chummy with his subjects. His way with people paid off, though; few politicians or celebrities ever bypass “Larry King Live.”
Burt Reynolds “You can’t act,” Burt Reynolds was told when he was fired from one of his acting jobs. He later became the No. 1 box office draw for five consecutive years.
Steve Jobs He co-founded Apple Computer in his garage, and then got fired from his own company. Jobs picked up the pieces and bought a majority share in Pixar in 1986. Nine years later, he won an Oscar for Toy Story. In 1996, he was back at Apple.
Abraham Lincoln Abe Lincoln failed in business in 1831 and again in 1833. In the meantime, he ran for state legislator and lost. His sweetheart died in 1835, and he had a nervous breakdown the next year. He lost the nomination to Congress in 1843, was defeated again for Congress in 1848 and 1855 and lost the vice presidency of the United States in 1856. Then he ran for Senator in 1858 and lost.
In 1860 Abe Lincoln was elected president of the United States. The rest is history.
Time
“There was a small gold box that his dad kept locked on top of his desk. I must have asked him a thousand times what was inside. All he’d ever tell me was ‘the thing I value most,’ Jack said.
It was gone. Everything about the house was exactly how Jack remembered it, except for the box. He figured someone from the Belser family had taken it.
“Now I’ll never know what was so valuable to him,” Jack said. “I better get some sleep. I have an early flight home, Mom.”
It had been about two weeks since Mr. Belser died. Returning home from work one day Jack discovered a note in his mailbox. “Signature required on a package. No one at home. Please stop by the main post office within the next three days,” the note read.
Early the next day Jack retrieved the package. The small package was old and looked like it had been mailed a hundred years ago.. The handwriting was difficult to read, but the return address caught his attention. “Mr. Harold Belser” it read. Jack took it out to his car and ripped open the package. There inside was the gold box and an envelope. Jack’s hands shook as he read the note inside.
Upon my death, please forward this package and its contents to Jack Belser. It’s the thing I valued most in my life.” A small key was taped to the letter. His heart racing, as tears filling his eyes, Jack carefully unlocked the box. There inside he found a beautiful gold pocket watch.
Running his fingers slowly over the finely etched casing, he unlatched the cover. Inside he found these words engraved:
“Jack, Thanks for your time! -Harold Belser.” The thing he valued most was…..my time.
Jack held the watch for a few minutes, then called his office and cleared his appointments for the next two days. “Why?” Janet, his assistant asked.
“I need some time to spend with my son,” he said.
“Oh, by the way, Janet, thanks for your time!”
If you would like to watch a wonderful, life changing movie, get yourself all prepared with the time to watch a full length movie, and then go to this site and be ready for a life changing experience. .…………….. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/english.html
For the last 20 years I have presented the Gospel to each new youth at the highly secure prison for the kids ages 13 to 19 at Gainesville, Texas. It is the first time that most any of them have stopped “running on the streets” and had the time to think about their life. Most every one made a decision to make God part of their life. After our hour+ together I would write each one a letter. As a result I corresponded more with many of them. And in each letter I would enclose a group of short stories or poems. They really liked them, especially those with an emotional message.You probably would not believe how many locked-up prison boys have loved theses little stories, and read them over and over.
In my soon to be published book I enclosed a long list of those short stories in the Appendix. Since the prison boys liked them so much, I thought you may like to see some of them. So, here is a 26th group of them for you. And you are welcome to share them with others.
Ron
Where You Going?
Where you going?
Not “where are you going,” but “where you going?”
As I held my shoes and socks in my hand, the six-year-old repeated the question. After the second repeat the three-year-old joined in.
“Where you going?”
People think that husbands are often bothered by wives asking them where they are going. That’s nothing compared to the two little ones.
I was downstairs with them so I replied, “I’m going upstairs.”
“But where you going?”
They knew that I did not require socks and shoes to go upstairs.
I could immediately answer them, I knew where I was going, that wasn’t the problem. The problem is that children, like adults, often don’t initially ask the real question.
Invariably, whenever I answer where I am going, I am bombarded with the next question:
“Can I go?” “Can I go?”
That’s the real question they wanted to ask.
One must make it a point that wherever one is going, it is a place that one would not mind one’s children knowing about. Whatever one is going to do, it should be something they can be proud of.
Whether you know it or not, children eventually find out where you are going.
Eventually they ask of life on some level, “Can I go too?”
THE WONDER OF PRAYER!
Have you considered the wonder of prayer? That we can pray anytime, anywhere? That we can lift our hearts to God above? To one who cares for us with his tender love?
Oh, how good to turn to him when in need! To know he listens, that he pays heed! To bring our burdens to him, and to bring our cares! In a sense he’s waiting just to meet us there!
God wants us to bring our needs to him, whether they’re big or small. None are overlooked by him. He’s concerned about them all.
If you are God’s child, Here’s what you should do: Pray to him daily. He wants to hear from you.
Pray in the name of Jesus, God’s own beloved Son. He honors the name of Jesus, and remarkable things get done.
Give thanks for God’s answers given to your prayers. They are his reminders that he really, truly cares!
By Pastor Bruce Oyen
The Wooden Bowl
A frail old man went to live with his son, daughter-in-law, and four-year old grandson. The old man’s hands trembled, his eyesight was blurred, and his step faltered.
The family ate together at the table but the elderly grandfather’s shaky hands and failing sight made eating difficult. Peas rolled off his spoon onto the floor.
When he grasped the glass, milk spilled on the tablecloth. The son and daughter-in-law became irritated with the mess.
“We must do something about Grandfather,” said the son. “I’ve had enough of his spilled milk, noisy eating, and food on the floor.” So the husband and wife set a small table in the corner.
There, Grandfather ate alone while the rest of the family enjoyed dinner. Since Grandfather had broken a dish or two, his food was served in a wooden bowl that they found in the cabinet.
When the family glanced in Grandfather’s direction sometimes he had a tear in his eye as he sat alone. Still, the only words the couple had for him were sharp admonitions when he dropped a fork or spilled food.
The four-year-old watched it all in silence.
One evening before supper, the father noticed his son playing with wood scraps on the floor.
He asked the child sweetly, “What are you making?”
Just as sweetly, the boy responded, “Oh, I am making a little bowl for you and Mama to eat your food when I grow up.”
The four-year-old smiled and went back to work.
The words so struck the parents that they were speechless. Then tears started to stream down their cheeks. Though no word was spoken, both knew what must be done.
That evening the husband took Grandfather’s hand and gently led him back to the family table. For the remainder of his days, he ate every meal with the family. And for some reason, neither husband nor wife seemed to care any longer when a fork was dropped, milk spilled, or the tablecloth soiled.
Children are remarkably perceptive. Their eyes ever observe, their ears ever listen, and their minds ever process the messages they absorb. If they see us patiently provide a happy home atmosphere, they will imitate that attitude for the rest of their lives.
The wise parent realizes that every day the building blocks are being laid for the child’s future.
Let’s be wise builders and role models. And realize that the Lord Jesus is observing us.
If you would like to watch a wonderful, life changing movie, get yourself all prepared with the time to watch a full length movie, and then go to this site and be ready for a life changing experience. .…………….. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/english.html
For the last 20 years I have presented the Gospel to each new youth at the highly secure prison for the kids ages 13 to 19 at Gainesville, Texas. It is the first time that most any of them have stopped “running on the streets” and had the time to think about their life. Most every one made a decision to make God part of their life. After our hour+ together I would write each one a letter. As a result I corresponded more with many of them. And in each letter I would enclose a group of short stories or poems. They really liked them, especially those with an emotional message.You probably would not believe how many locked-up prison boys have loved theses little stories, and read them over and over.
In my soon to be published book I enclosed a long list of those short stories in the Appendix. Since the prison boys liked them so much, I thought you may like to see some of them. So, here is a 25th group of them for you. And you are welcome to share them with others.
Ron
God Was Busy
If you don’t know GOD, don’t make stupid remarks!!!!!
A United States Marine was taking some college courses between assignments. He had completed 20 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan . One of the courses had a professor who was an avowed atheist.
One day the professor shocked the class when he came in. He looked to the ceiling and flatly stated, “GOD, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform…
I’ll give you exactly 15 min.” The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop. Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, “Here I am GOD, I’m still waiting.”
It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform. The professor was out cold.
The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently. The other students were shocked and stunned, and sat there looking on in silence. The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked, “What in the world is the matter with you? Why did you do that? The Marine calmly replied, “GOD was busy today protecting America ‘s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid shit and act like an idiot. So He sent me.”
The classroom erupted in cheers!
USC Professor…………
This is a true story of something that happened just a few years ago at the University of Southern California .
There was a professor of philosophy there who was a deeply committed atheist.
His primary goal for one required class was to spend the entire semester proving that God couldn’t exist.
His students were always afraid to argue with him because of his impeccable logic.
Sure, some had argued in class at times, but no one had ever really gone against him because of his reputation.
At the end of every semester on the last day, he would say to his class of 60 students, ‘If there is anyone here who still believes in Jesus, stand up!’
In twenty years, no one had ever stood up. They knew what he was going to do next. He would say, ‘Because anyone who believes in God is a fool’.
If God existed, he could stop this piece of chalk from hitting the ground and breaking; such a simple task to prove that He is God, and yet He can’t do it.’
And every year, he would drop the chalk onto the tile floor of the classroom and it would shatter into many pieces.
All of the students would do nothing but stop and stare.
Most of the students became convinced that God couldn’t exist. Certainly, a number of Christians had slipped through, but for 20 years, they had been too afraid to stand up.
Well, a few years ago there was a freshman from Texas who happened to enroll.
He was a Christian, and had heard the stories about this professor.
He was required to take the class for his major, and he was afraid. But for three months that semester, he intently prayed every morning that he would have the courage to stand up no matter what the professor said, or what the class thought.
Nothing they said could ever shatter his faith…he hoped.
Finally, the day came. The professor said, “If there is anyone here who still believes in God, stand up!” The professor and the class of 60 people looked at him, shocked, as he stood up at the back of the classroom.
The professor shouted, “You FOOL!!!
If God existed, he would keep this piece of chalk from breaking when it hit the ground!”
He proceeded to drop the chalk, but as he did, it slipped out of his fingers, off his shirt cuff, onto the pleat of his pants, down his leg, and off his shoe. As it hit the ground, it simply rolled away unbroken.
The professor’s jaw dropped as he stared at the chalk. He looked up at the young man, and then ran out of the lecture hall.
The young man who had stood, proceeded to walk to the front of the room and shared his faith in Jesus for the next half hour. 60 students stayed and listened as he told of God’s love for them and of His power through Jesus.
WET PANTS
Come with me to a third grade classroom…. There is a nine-year-old kid sitting at his desk and all of a sudden, there is a puddle between his feet and the front of his pants are wet. He thinks his heart is going to stop because he cannot possibly imagine how this has happened. It’s never happened before, and he knows that when the boys find out he will never hear the end of it. When the girls find out, they’ll never speak to him again as long as he lives.
The boy believes his heart is going to stop; he puts his head down and prays this prayer, ‘Dear God, this is an emergency! I need help now! Five minutes from now I’m dead meat.’
He looks up from his prayer and here comes the teacher with a look in her eyes that says he has been discovered.
As the teacher is walking toward him, a classmate named Susie is carrying a goldfish bowl that is filled with water.
Susie trips in front of the teacher and inexplicably dumps the bowl of water in the boy’s lap.
The boy pretends to be angry, but all the while is saying to himself, ‘Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!’
Now, all of a sudden, instead of being the object of ridicule, the boy is the object of sympathy. The teacher rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts to put on while his pants dry out. All the other children are on their hands and knees cleaning up around his desk. The sympathy is wonderful. But as life would have it, the ridicule that should have been his has been transferred to someone else – Susie.
She tries to help, but they tell her to get out. ‘You’ve done enough, you klutz!’
Finally, at the end of the day, as they are waiting for the bus, the boy walks over to Susie and whispers, ‘You did that on purpose, didn’t you?’ Susie whispers back, ‘I wet my pants once too.’
May God help us see the opportunities that are always around us to do good….
Remember…. Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.
Each and everyone one of us may be going through tough times right now, but God is getting ready to bless you in a way that only He can if you are staying close to Him.
Keep the faith.
If you would like to watch a wonderful, life changing movie, get yourself all prepared with the time to watch a full length movie, and then go to this site and be ready for a life changing experience. .…………….. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/english.html
And every year, he would drop the chalk onto the tile floor of the classroom and it would shatter into many pieces. 
Susie trips in front of the teacher and inexplicably dumps the bowl of water in the boy’s lap.
True Texan Tales 