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.

Also, 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.

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:

                                                         General Lemay in Asia

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 Boeing’s 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.

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.

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.

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 only 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 Japan ’s 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.

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.”

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.

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 Leman 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 in Europe

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. 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 Fock-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 factory’s 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.
They 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.

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 over Berlin .”

While in China with Chinese Intelligence I wanted to visit and see the area where Lottie Moon had ministered.  So, they agreed to take me there.  At that time there were no flights to Yantai, the main prefecture city.  There were no fast trains, either.  We had to take a really slow “local” that made many stops and took two nights. 

That coastal area of China is famous for its seafood, and I can attest that it is really great.  But we were there in January and it was really cold.  What tourists come there, come in the summer.  We had to wear really warm clothing, for the hotels and restaurants are just not prepared for hosting people in the cold winters there. 

The Chinese authorities that I met there had never heard of Miss Moon.  Neither had the Intelligence people.  I tried to tell them how famous she was and what an influence she had been there.  I pitched it that if we found the church where she had worshiped, it would make that whole area a better tourist attraction.  As a result, after I had left, the Chinese authorities did research and found that it was all true.  They even discovered that The Baptists had established a Christian Seminary in the area. 

Baker James Cauthen started the Seminary there.  In 1939, Dr. Cauthen and his wife, Eloise, went to China as missionaries before the country fell to Japanese invaders.

Later he was executive secretary and then executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board from 1954 until he retired at the end of 1979.  The number of Southern Baptist missionaries increased from 908 to nearly 3,000 under his leadership. The number of countries where they served grew from 32 to 95. The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation’s main Baptist body, with more than 15 million members.

The evangelist Billy Graham called Dr. Cauthen ”one of the greatest missionary statesmen in all American church life.”  The last time I heard him speak was at a colloquium in Williamsburg Virginia in 1976.  (A convention is a gathering together if churches; a colloquium is a gathering together of universities.)  As Chairman of the Board of Dallas Baptist University I went to the Colloquium of Baptist universities that was held there to commemorate the Bi-Centennial.  It was dangerous to go to hear Dr. Cauthen speak.  When he finished, you were ready to pack your bags and just leave for the foreign mission field.

Anyway, that night in Yantai the Chinese said we were to leave early the next morning for Penglai and visit Lottie Moon’s church. 

Late that night I got a telephone call.  Like who do I know in Yantai?  It was Eloise Cauthen, Dr, Cauthen’s widow.  She had come back to Shandong Province to “teach English” where she had been as a missionary way before WWII and where she had been reared, since her father had been a missionary there too.  She had heard somehow that we were going to Penglai the next morning and she wanted to go too.  She said that she had been able to go there and had driven by the church but was never given permission to go inside its gate and wall.

Certainly, I was happy to welcome her, and she was there bright and early the next morning.  She had a helper that had been sent with her to Yantai by the Foreign Mission Board to take care of her as they were to “teach English” there.  However, in my opinion, Mrs. Cauthen was in better shape than the helper.  She looked great, all dressed in a fur coat and beautiful fur hat.

We boarded a little bus that the Chinese had provided.  On the drive it was so interesting to visit with Mrs. Cauthen and hear her recollections of that area where she had been reared, and where she had returned with her husband in 1939.  She said that she had visited the Baptist seminary buildings which were now a Chinese school.  She said that she had even found her old piano which was still in use in the school.

We arrived in Penglai and as we went over the bridge spanning the river there, they pointed out the back of one of the church buildings that backed-up to the river.  We turned left and went down a long lane of really old Chinese houses all jammed together with no spaces between and with their old-style tile roofs.  We then turned left again into an open area in front of the main church sanctuary.

Of course, I wanted to be sure this was the real, authentic place. 

In one of Miss Moon’s biography’s there was a picture of a large commemorative arch over the old road to the church.  It was a famous icon, for that area: The commemoration of a famous Chinese General from generations past, named Ji Qi Guang.  Sure enough, just beyond the open space, over the old road was the big Arch.  I knew we were for sure there, in front of Lottie Moon’s church’s sanctuary with its steeple and cross on top of that.

Mrs. Cauthen and I walked up to the gate.  There was a small arch over the gate with a Christian cross built into the keystone of the arch.  The hollow space of the cross was completely filled with stones that had been put there by the Cultural Revolution young people. 

You have probably read about it.  

When Chairman Mao was afraid that he was going to be deposed, he started it.  It was one of the most gruesome times in modern human history.  These passionate teenagers took over the country to “cleanse it” as they called it.  They all carried one of Chairman Mao’s little red books.   Or, to give its full title, “Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong”.  It contains 267 aphorisms from the Communist Chinese leader, covering subjects such as class struggle, “correcting mistaken ideas” and the “mass line”, a key tenet of Mao Zedong Thought. 

It is dated May 1964.  It is estimated that between 800 and 900 million copies were printed world-wide by 1967.

Hitler and Stalin were branded as mass murderers.  What they did was nothing compared to Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  Articles in History Today say that over 45 million people died under Mao.  Many were starved to death, many were murdered, and many committed suicide.  People had their jobs, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. 

It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction.  

One article in History Today describes how when a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: One of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling iron tool – punishment for digging up one potato.

Anyone who was a teacher or any kind of professional or even known to be educated was sent to the countryside to do menial labor on farms.  So very many died there from starvation and abuse.  All schools were closed for several of those years.  When it finally ended, students who were now past college age did not know whether to go back to school or skip going back.

When you ask a Chinese who lived through that period, they will say, “I don’t know for sure what kind of government that I want, I just know that I never want anything like that again,” as I mentioned earlier.  Another thing that it did that I also mentioned briefly earlier is that by wiping out all religion for that whole period, it created a spiritual vacuum that is now being filled by Christianity in many cases.

Anyway, back to Penglai and Miss Moon’s church.  Like I said, the Cultural Revolution people had filled the Christian cross on the arch over the church’s gate with pebbles, but it was still quite visible.

We went through the gate and before we reached the door to the church, there just on our left was a fairly large obelisk type monument.  It had inscriptions on all sides.  Even though they were not in Simplified Mandarin,  Mrs. Cauthen could read them.  This was a stone monument commemorating Lottie Moon and her Girl’s School.  Mrs. Cauthen and I just stood there in amazed silence, thinking the same thing.   The Cultural Revolution kids destroyed everything like this, for sure.  We both acknowledged out loud that only God Himself had preserved this monument to Lottie Moon because of all her dedicated, Godly work and all that she and her memory stood for.

The inside of the church was all wood and very clean.  It had been meticulously cleaned in anticipation of our arrival.  The lectern was still there on the raised dais like ready for a sermon.  The chairs for the choir were all in place.  The pews were there, but they had all been moved back, for the local Chinese had been using the building to store sacks of cement.  That was because it had the best roof in town that did not leak.   We could still smell the cement which must have been moved out the afternoon before.

After looking around, Mrs. Cauthen went back outside.  However, I went upstairs and looked through the class rooms there.  I am sure these were used by Miss Moon so many years before.  Many still had their little small sized chairs.

I went back outside and through the gate, and there was Mrs. Cauthen surrounded by a group of really old men who lived in those old row buildings.   I took a picture of her in her fur hat conversing with them.  She told me that they had related to her how her father, Wiley B Glass, had baptized them, many years before.

The Mayor of Penglai had us to lunch with other dignitaries of the town.  They patiently listened as I encouraged them to preserve the church and to become acquainted with who Lottie Moon had been.  I assured them that many Baptists from the US would want to visit, for I knew how important tourism would be to that poor area.

We went back to Yantai and took a train on to Jinan , the capital of Shandon Province, and then on to Shanghai from where we could catch a plane to the south part of China to Guilin where we could finally warm-up.

I do think that my exhortations to the Authorities in Penglai and also Chinese Intelligence there had an effect. For, that church in Penglai now has a fine young pastor and is thriving.  It is totally filled on Sundays and other days.  In the church office they have two book cases filled with mementos of Lottie Moon and several pictures of her from those days.  They dug them up from somewhere.

But what is really amazing to me is that every August they now hold a big celebration service in her honor.  I think the tradition started in 2012 to honor what they called “the 100th anniversary celebration of Lottie Moon’s “heavenly journey”.  Different choirs come in from churches in all the surrounding communities, each dressed in their own distinctive robes.  Women even act out scenes from her life as they sing and ask God to mold their lives as “Mu La Di” (the name they use for Lottie Moon) would want them to be.  All through this service and the singing and the sermon that follows you hear the words “mu la di xiong di jie mei”, which translates “Miss Moon, my older sister”.

Bruce Moon is a fine Christian fellow who has taken many summer mission trips to China to teach English in their universities.  His wife does amateur genealogical research and found that he was actually distantly related to Miss Moon as her fourth cousin “twice removed.”  In 2015 while he was teaching in Beijing he got a three day weekend.  He wondered if anyone in Shandon Province remembered Lottie Moon.  He was able to book a fairly fast train straight to Yanti and a bus on to Penglai where he had reserved a room.  On Saturday morning he asked the people in the hotel if they knew about this church.  He had a picture of it on his cell phone.  By now Bruce’s Chinese was fairly good.  When he asked at the front desk about a “jiao hui” (church teaching meeting) or “jiao tang” (church teaching building) he got no response.  Then when he showed them the picture they and the taxi driver there all said “Ji Qi Gong” the name of the famous General for which the arch had been built there over the road at the site of the church.

Bruce was able walk the few blocks straight there.  He found the General’s arch and he found the church.  Since it was a Saturday morning he figured no one would be there, but he heard singing from the sanctuary.  He figured it must be a children’s choir practicing.

The gate was locked from the inside, but there were two men just inside that opened it for him.   He saw the monument to Miss Moon that he had already heard about, then went on inside.  Much to his amazement there were over 400 people there.  Through amazing co-incidence (or as he later figured “God’s timing”) he had arrived on the one day of the year they were commemorating the memory of Lottie Moon.   All the different choir’s were there in their different colored robes and the resident choir up front with their white robes.  He said they had a large screen-projection up high in front honoring Miss Moon. 

After all the performances the pastor of the church delivered a sermon where they said “Mu La Di” many times. Then he and the congregation sang “Jesus Loves” me, and a woman’s group sang two more songs.  The finale was Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” sung by the massed choirs.

On his way out, Bruce showed the pastor his passport with the name of Moon on it and explained that he was actually related to her.  The pastor took him up to the church office and showed him all the old pictures of Miss Moon and her girls.  There was even an old picture of the Moon home back in Virginia from the early 1800’s.  Bruce had no idea how they got that. 

So, because of Miss Moon’s remaining influence, her old church (Wulin Shenghui Church of Penglai) has recently been designated as a Nationally Protected Historical and Cultural Site by The State Council of the People’s Republic of China. In 2001, a new hall was built covering an area of 4,089 square meters (1 acres) with a capacity of more than 1,400 people at one time. The membership has now grown to more than 4,000. 

So, Miss Lottie Moon’s tradition and influence lives on there on the coast in Shandong Province in China. 

Just as an example, here is a recent picture of 176 new Christians being baptized at one service of that church.  In China they do not baptize laying down, but kneel beneath the water as Jesus did in the Jordan River. 

If you have ever been involved with Southern Baptists, I am sure you know about Lottie Moon.   She was a missionary to China in the late eighteen hundreds.  Southern Baptists have the largest foreign mission effort of any group in the world.  They raise almost all that money each year at Christmas time.  It is called the Lottie Moon offering in honor of Miss Moon. 

She was one of the last of the great Southern ladies.  She was so fluent in Latin and Greek that she was offered a full Professorships at Harvard to teach Greek.  That was a great honor and opportunity for a woman in those days as it would be today.  She was also courted by some spectacular gentlemen wanting to marry her.  However, she turned it all down to go to China as a single lady missionary to join her sister who had recently gone there.  She sailed from San Francisco on September 1, 1873.

She wound up in Shandong Province in the town of Penglai , just up the coast from the larger prefecture city of Yantai .  Life was not easy in China in those days, especially in that cold sea-coast area.  She was under five feet tall.  Now days, most foreign missionaries get to return home every five years, but not in those days.  She stayed for so very many years.  However, she was forced to leave for Japan for a short time during the Boxer Rebellion in China , but returned to Shandong Province .  She also returned home to bring her sister back just before Christmas in 1876.  She did not have enough money to go back to China , but the Baptist churches in the area of her home got the money together for her to sail again for China on November 8,1877. 

Two biographies have been written about her.  If you want to be inspired concerning real service to God, I would encourage you to read one of them. The last is called The New Lottie Moon Story.  For most all those years there she ran a girl’s boarding school headquartered in her residence with some classes meeting in the church she attended in Penglai.   But she regularly took trips into the interior teaching the Gospel.  Travel was really tough over the unimproved roads there.  Most of the time she used a Shentze.  It was a basket enclosed by curtains and hung on poles between two donkeys.  To say the least, it was not a comfortable way to travel.  At other times she would travel in a chair suspended from poles carried my men called bearers and hired at very little cost.

She would stop at homes to teach the Gospel, mostly to groups of women.   Life in the homes in the cold, wet countryside of Shandong Province revolved around the kang.  It was a clay covered tunnel about three feet off the dirt floors.  It varied from a few feet to five or more feet wide.  It was hollow and heated usually from an opening to the outside by burning sticks and brush and sometimes coal.  In a large room it would run down the center of the room.  In a small room, it may take up the whole room.  In her writings, Miss Moon described how she would teach the bible while sitting on the kang to keep warm.  I have stayed in those farmhouses in Shandong Province on January days.  We would eat off a low table with all sitting on the kang.  Also, as honored guest on those occasions, I would get to sleep on the kang at night.  It is the primary source for heat in those country homes, as it has been for thousands of years. 

In her girl’s schools, Miss Moon taught the girls strict manners just like in the old South in the US .  As part of their lessons, the girls were taught to memorize and recite whole sections of the bible.  She wrote that some girls could recite the whole New Testament book of Mark and of Mathew.

Penglai went by the name of Tengchow in those days, but it was a rather formal and dreary place.  However, it was under consular authority and safe for foreigners.  

Penglai was also a coastal city, like Yantai and for many generations was a naval headquarters.  It has a large old harbor that is dug out and still has the huge gates that could be closed to protect the old Chinese wooden ships after they had entered the harbor.

Just before the year 1885, Miss Moon began to hear about an area 120 miles inland called P’ingtu.  Although it was an agricultural area, it had a walled city by the same name.  No explanation has ever been found why, but the people in that whole area most all felt that there must be a real god and they were hungry and even anxious to know about Him.  There were different vegetarian sects there which were anxiously open to knowing the Gospel.  They were all seeking the real god that they just knew must exist but did not know how to find Him.  

Miss Moon went there to visit for a month and eventually moved there.  Previously, she had never been more than 50 miles inland.  Living inland as a foreigner she had no official protection.  The US Consul in Tengchow really frowned on any foreign women going inland.  She was the only foreigner there, but she could not resist the hunger of the people there to know about the real God.  She first made friends with the people individually in their homes, and then began to spread the Gospel to that whole area.

Her letters back to Virginia were distributed to Baptist churches all across the Southern States.  Such results of the Gospel being planted there in that foreign land were thrilling to the Christian people of the deep south. 

Eventually, young college age girls would go and stay with Miss Moon during summers.  She was such an inspiration to them.  One of my favorite stories about Miss Moon happened on one of those summer evenings.  It was her custom to read the bible and explain the scriptures to the young ladies and have prayer before bedtime.  On this particular evening as Miss Moon was reading from the bible, the girls stopped her.  They asked:  “Miss Moon, what translation of the bible are you reading from?  We have never heard it expressed in those particular words.”  Miss Moon looked up a little confused, and then showed the girls that, as was her custom, she was reading directly from the Greek texts and translating to the girls straight from the Greek. 

She stayed in that area of Shandong Province for the rest of here life, becoming a big influence on the people there.  Finally in 1912, being quite ill, she got passage on a ship back to the US .  However, she died aboard ship shortly after leaving on December 12. 

Her letters back to the US were such an inspiration to the churches that she was a major influence for Foreign Missions to the whole Southern Baptist Denomination.   Under her name they raise most all their budget for foreign missions every year…..a big influence on the whole world.   
 

 After the trip to China just described, I worked with Chinese Intelligence for 22 years.  But before you question whether that was “good” or not let me explain.  Shortly after 1980 the Chinese authorities were still determined to know about the United States’ “management system”………just like the authorities in Russia wanted to know.  

Since central planning of a huge economy by government bureaucrats has never ever worked, and things in the U.S. economy work so wonderfully well, they assumed that we had this magically wonderful system as I have explained previously.  Since Dallas is a well-known business center, they sent one of their bright young intelligence operatives to Dallas to find the answer to our system. 

He enrolled in Dallas Baptist University to get a Master’s Degree in Business.  Since I was on the Board of Trustees of the University, he came down to my office to meet me to gather his “intelligence information”.  I wanted him to know our Capitalist system, so I was happy to co-operate.  I actually had him read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations so he could learn about the “guiding had of the market” that works so well under the freedom of Capitalism. 

We became good friends.  However, he had been tasked by the Chinese Authorities with another task.  They wanted to know about these Christians.  Why do they want to come to China ?  Are they a danger?  Should we let them in?  Do they want to overthrow the government?  That is why he had enrolled in Dallas Baptist University , since it is a Christian school.  He eventually sent reports to China that Christians were the most honest people that they would find….that Christians were the ones who could be the most trusted. 

When China first opened-up there is no telling how many evangelical types wanted to go to China a be a missionary.  There would be a Pentecostal pastor in Arkansas who had two churches there.  He would feel that he needed to go to China and convert the people.  China got a plethora of such requests.  So many of such folks asked for permission to go there and teach English as a cover for their real mission. 

My Chinese “Handler” was gracious enough to show me the response of his superiors.  It went something like this:  “Let them come and teach English.  We need the hard currency they will bring.  They are not going to hurt anything.  We will watch them.” 

In 1989 I went to China with my handler and a small group of Master’s Degree students from Dallas Baptist University .  At that time it was still necessary to fly to Hong Kong, take the train to Guangzhou , and then fly to where ever one wished to go in China .  We wished to fly directly on the Beijing .  Right away I learned that there are certain advantages to a centrally planned and managed government if you are one of the “insiders”. 

We were tired and wanted to get on to Beijing , but all the flights were full for the next several days.  Those of us from the US thought what a bum situation that was.  However, that was when my handler opened his wallet and pulled out this little card.  I could not read the Chinese on it, but it looked very “official”.  The airline folks promptly bumped  off enough people on the next plane leaving Guangzhou and we promptly boarded and took off.   Not good for regular Chinese citizens and tourists, but great for those in authority. 

In Beijing I met with some of China ’s top authorities.  This would happen at banquets that I would host for them.  One of the most interesting was one where I hosted a banquet for the fellow who was over all of the many minority people groups in China.  It was at one of those typical big round tables.  He had brought many of his top aides.  As at many such business dinners we had the big, common hot pot.  This one was not electric, but coal fired with a big flue on top.   The servers would bring in all kinds of meat thinly sliced and rolled into many small rolls……beef, pork, mutton, goat meat, dog meat, monkey meat, snake, and no telling what else.  The Head of Minorities was from one of the minority provinces, Guangxi.  His home was in Nanning , the capital of that province where I subsequently stayed many times.  He gave permission for the Jesus film to be put into several of the many minority languages spoken in Guangxi. 

At this dinner, the hot pot was unusually large.  It had a complete circle filled with boiling water around its base.  People would take turns putting the different meats into the pot to boil and then take it out with their chopsticks to eat.   However, they would take turns dipping their cooked meat into a big pot of extremely hot/spicy sauce to “out macho” each other.  I really detest this macho stuff that some Chinese men do.  So I broke all precedent and decorum and just dumped the whole bowl of the super hot sauce into the common circle of boiling water. 

That stopped all the macho stuff, and as it turned out, greatly pleased the Head of Minorities since he did not like all the macho stuff either. 

On this trip, we were there just a few months before the student takeover of Tiananmen Square .  Deng Xiaoping was the absolute ruler of China from 1978 until his death in 1997.  Late in his life he had others take the title of President of China, but he was still the boss.  He had lived for 5 years in Paris , France .  On that trip he passed through Singapore in 1920.  However, soon after taking over as the leader of China , he visited Singapore again in 1978. 

On his trip to Singapore he had a full schedule of activities.  However, his first activity was to meet Lee Kuan Yew, Founding Father and First Premier of Singapore.  Lee lived until he was age 91 and did not die until 3/23/2015 after governing for 30 years.  Deng was so impressed with want Premier Lee had done to build that little country into one of the most prosperous places in the world, that he just canceled all of his schedule and spent almost the whole time with Premier Lee, learning how he had done such a fantastic job.  One reason that he was so interested was that Singapore was almost totally populated with ethnic Chinese.  They had most all come there as uneducated coolie laborers, but now they and their decedents were wealthy, sophisticated people. 

Lee showed Deng that his main secret was to give business-people and most anyone wanting to go into business almost complete freedom…….as few restrictions as possible on starting and operating a business.  What Deng saw in Singapore was such a revelation to him that he went back to China , determined to do the same thing there.  He decided to implement these freedoms in stages.  His first stage was to start with China ’s farmers.  When I was there in 1989, the farmers had just received their first freedoms.  They were setting up markets in all of the towns and cities across China and were getting rich.  Later, Deng told everyone to “go and get rich”.And now, amazing wealth has been amassed across the country.  China will soon have more billionaires than the US according to Forbes Magazine. 

On that trip we visited a farmer’s co-op in Shandong province which was not only selling their agricultural products for good profits, they were generating the electricity for that whole area, they had all manner of side businesses, they had their own private planes, and were even charging money to show other farm groups how to do what they were doing.  I will give more information about the results of  Deng’s new policies and their influence on China later. 

On this trip, I really wanted to meet Bishop Ting, who was over all Christian activities in China .  His office was in Nanjing where he was head of a large seminary and where he was training new Christian pastors and was printing bibles to distribute across China .  That printing operation was called Amity Press. 

Before I left for China for that trip, my friends at Campus Crusade (like Dr. Bill Bright) told me that I would not get to meet him, since they had not gotten to meet him.  I was told the same thing by Billy Graham’s folks.  But they each told me that if I did get to meet him:  “Would I please ask him questions that only he would know the answers to…….like, ‘Is there any Christian activity at all in North Korea.’” 

We visited Nanjing , and found that Bishop Ting (he had once been an Anglican Bishop before the revolution) was quite shielded for some reason.  It did seem that it was going to be impossible to meet him.  

In China the Shanghai Language Institute is one of the primary places where Chinese Intelligence people are trained.  If a Chinese ever tells you that is where he went to school, you can be sure that he is probably with their Intelligence Service.  Well, my handler called one of his former classmates from that institution that he knew now lived in Nanjing .  Amazingly she happened to have the private phone number of Bishop Ting.  Bishop Ting was contacted and agreed to meet us the next day out in front of his Seminary in front of anyone who may be shielding him.

Of course, I was concerned about how I could ask him the sensitive questions that those in the US had requested of me with official Chinese interpreters in attendance.  There was no worry.  Bishop Ting has a Master’s Degree in English from Boston College.  My English will never be as good as his.  He welcomed our little group warmly and ushered us into his office at the Seminary.  Since he had been out of the country to speak at certain meetings, he was able to give us essays that he had written concerning his speeches at those places. 

His one primary theme was that the United States did not need to send missionaries to China, that Chinese pastors could get the job done with just some support and backing from the US.  He iterated that there had only been a small number of Christians before the revolution, but that there were many, many thousands now….that they were doing a fairly good job of evangelizing.  And he did express his burning desire to see all of China won to Jesus. Not knowing anything about my handler who was there, present, Bishop Ting urged him to return to China and help to win China to Jesus. 

He showed us through the Amity Press where they were printing all kinds of bibles for China ….millions.   He also showed us through the art department of the seminary.  There the senior professor drew one of those popular Chinese vertical paintings showing a bond between their Seminary and Dallas Baptist University.

In the Summer of 1980 China had just been opened to outsiders. The people there all still wore those grey baggy clothes……everyone the same. If one was privileged to be able to “dress up” it had to be in one of those Mao suits. There was no style, no color as respects clothing. Except for a very few cars, all local transportation was by bicycle, just hundreds of thousands of them in each city.

Just about the only Americans that the Chinese had seen were a few retired professors and doctors, no American young people. But in the late summer of 1980 a handful of us along with Campus Crusade took 350 young people into China . They caused a huge sensation. Most of them had been following up in places like the Philippines behind where the Jesus film had been shown the previous summer. They had been starting bible classes and bible study groups, discipling new converts, and even starting new churches.

We, along with some of the real “tigers” at Camus Crusade wanted to know what the Christian situation was in newly opened China . Were there still Christians? Were there any Christians in places of authority? Were Christians welcome there? Was there any persecution of Christians?

We were very surprised to find all manner of Christians is very high places. We found no persecution, anywhere. And since we came openly as Christians, we were welcomed in the most extra-ordinary manner.

You may know that one of the most important buildings in all of China , right on the west side of Tiananmen Square , is The Great Hall of The People. It is where the Communist representatives from across the county meet to “elect” their new leaders, and where their new Five Year Plans are announced in convocations. It could be described as the very inner-sanctum of the Communist Party.

Much to our amazement, because they wanted to show that Christians were welcome, our whole group, including the 350 young people were given a grand banquet right in the Great Hall of The People. Many of the top Chinese Authorities were in attendance and welcomed us in a welcoming line of introduction. The food was most grand, some of the best in Beijing . The tables were typical Chinese, big and round and with their usual large revolving centerpieces. I co-hosted a table with the official who had been over what we would call the American Desk of their State Department when Nixon and Kissinger went there to help “open-up” China to the outside world. I think we were the first Americans to receive a banquet there in The Great Hall of the People since the one for Nixon and Kissinger.

I did fairly well with the protocol with my co-host at the dinner. One of my major tests was when I was supposed to reach way up to a platter being held overhead and offer him one of those slippery sea-urchins with my chopsticks. I am sure that it was only with God’s help that I got it safely down to his plate without having it squirt out onto the table. My only snafu was when I had dropped two grains of rice onto the table next to my plate. He watched those two grains for the longest time before he finally picked them up. He went on to explain that his grandfather had trained him like others in China to never leave a grain of rice on the table. It had to do with knowing about all the starving people across China in the past who had no rice.

The Chinese loved to hear our young people sing. After the dinner for the longest time we sang all the US patriotic songs and Christian songs that we could remember, like God Bless America, Jesus Loves Me, How Great Thou Art, and even The Lord’s Prayer………right there in the very inner-sanctum of Communism. I don’t know if they knew the meaning of any of the words or if any were interpreted for them, but the Chinese officials smiled and clapped the whole time.

The Chinese official that co-hosted the table with me that I described earlier was most interested that I had spent time in Moscow in the Kremlin. I had described to him how much the Russians wanted me to tell them about our US “management system”. He later met with me outside the building beside the hedges around the building where I tried to explain how free market capitalism is our “management system”……how we really don’t have any secret plan or system. Just like in Russia , government central planning for a whole economy by the bureaucrats under Communism, nothing works. Spare parts if they exist at all seem to never get where they are needed. Later, I had some of China ’s top leaders actually read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in which he describes what he calls “the guiding had of the market” under the freedom of Capitalism. It gets spare parts where they are needed and makes everything in the economy of a nation work beautifully without any planning.

We knew how these young people are so motivated to share the Gospel with others. We did not want to cause any problems, so each one of the 350 was given only one little book of The Four Spiritual Laws to take into China. I thought that it was so neat that each was printed inside of bright red covers, just like Chairman Mao’s little red books had their red covers, and which were carried by the young people that plunged China into that awful Cultural Revolution. That was where every teacher of professor or even what would be considered an educated person was banished out into the country to work in the fields and was so severely persecuted. Hundreds of thousands died. Many books have been written about what an awful time it was.

One of the results of it was to purge the entire population from any kind of overt religion or even spiritual philosophy or political thought across China . In 1980 and later if you would have the opportunity to engage the Chinese in any kind of political discussion, the answer was always the same: “We are not sure what system we really want in the future, but we are absolutely certain that we never want anything like that Cultural Revolution again.” It is my opinion that it created such a spiritual vacuum that it made a wonderful opportunity for Christianity to fill that vacuum.

Still testing things in China , we asked for something really bold. We asked for permission from the very top authorities “to hold a prayer meeting on top of the Great Wall of China to claim China for Jesus”. Much to our surprise we were given that permission without changing any of those words in the request.

At that time there were no tourist facilities at the Great Wall. There was not even a good road there. One took a special train there. It stopped at the wall and then waited until your group was ready to return. The distance is only 50 miles, but the train traveled fairly slowly and passes parts of other walls which were built way before the present one.

On the trip there I met a most interesting young man on the train. His father was one of the top officials in Beijing . He had learned English fairly well, and was already in Graduate School . but he really wanted to go on this trip to the Wall with all those American young people. He did remark something about what he called the “interesting spirit” that these young people seemed to have. I told him that we were going to have a “special meeting” on the Wall and encouraged him to attend and observe the “meeting” and tell me later on the return trip what he thought about it. I even asked him to see if he could feel anything at that “meeting”.

We went about a half mile east along the wall and climbed up to one of its highest parts. Every so often along the Wall there is a rock tower built for the guards who were stationed there. We held our prayer meeting on the east side of one of those towers which loomed above us. Some great and powerful prayers were offered by the young Campus Crusade leaders. They prayed earnestly for the Gospel to spread across China in the future, which is now happening.

On the return trip that same young man came and sat down beside me. I decided that it was a great opportunity to share the Gospel with him. I got out my one copy of the Four Spiritual Laws that was printed in Chinese and started explaining it to him.

He got so interested that the noise where we were on the train began to bother us for what was becoming a very intense conversation. We decided to go out between the cars on the train where we could be alone. This train was so well made that the spaces between the cars were closed-in with glass so it was fairly quiet. When we got to the part where it was time for him to pray the prayer to ask God into his life, he stopped. He said that maybe he had done so many wrong things in his life that he should not pray that prayer.

It was at this critical juncture that I needed to say just the right words to him, and I am totally convinced that God put just the perfect words into my mouth. I have since shared those words with hundreds and hundreds of my prison boys, and they are very effective and achieve amazing results with God’s leading.

So, I asked him if he had ever been “camping”. Then I said: “Oh, you wouldn’t know what that means, that doesn’t translate into Chinese.” However, he quickly said: “I have a masters degree in English, certainly I know what going camping means…..you sleep out in the woods under the trees, you cook your food over a wood fire, you catch a wild pig and you roast him and eat him.”

So I said: “OK. Let us assume that you go camping for two whole weeks. You sleep out under the trees, you have a great time, you catch your wild pig and roast him and eat him. He is really good.”

And he said: “Oh, that would be fun, and I could get away from that dorm and all those guys where I live at college.”

Then I said: “But the whole second week that you are there, you really begin thinking how great a shower would feel and clean clothes. You start just dreaming about them.

“You stay the whole two weeks; you have a great time, but by now you are really dirty and you smell really bad, and it is time for you to go back. You start the long walk back to the dormitory where you live with your friends. You have had a grand time, but all the way back you are thinking and dreaming about how wonderful that shower and those clean clothes will feel.

“Finally, you arrive back, and you see that all of your friends are getting on this bus. They are all dressed-up, fancy. You ask what is happening and they tell you—–’Oh, we have been invited to a banquet in The Great Hall of the People…..It is the chance of a lifetime for us. We have been getting ready all afternoon…..getting our hair combed just right, getting our shoes shined, and our ties on straight.’

“And you say: ‘Yes, you fellows really look great.’

“And they say: ‘Haven’t you heard!’

“And you say: ‘I haven’t heard anything. I have been out in the woods for two weeks!’

“And they say: ‘You were invited to this banquet too!’

“And you say: ‘No!’

“And they reply: ‘Yes! But it starts in just 15 minutes. We are already late leaving. Look!!! The bus is leaving right now. Jump on! You must go! It is the chance of a lifetime! You don’t have time to change or have a shower or get cleaned up. Hurry, hurry, hurry!’”

“Oh! How could you go to such a beautiful banquet with all of those dressed-up people as dirty and smelly as you were. Those Communist guards would never let you through the gate.”

But the young man saw what I was trying to show him. God has prepared Heaven like a great banquet for all of us—-for all of Eternity. He wants all of us to be there. But how can we be there in such purity and splendor—-as dirty and filthy as we have become? No matter how much He might love us, it just could not happen. But that is what the Forth Law is about.

Thus, The Forth Spiritual Law:

We must each one, individually receive Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord.  Then we can be in Heaven with Him, and know His love here and the wonderful plan that he has for our life here.

It is not enough to just believe in Him. The Devil believes in Him, but the Devil will not be in Heaven. Jesus called such a decision “being born again”…..having our souls washed clean. He did all the “work” for us when He died on the cross. But we have to each one individually accept it like accepting a contract.

Here is a person. The dots represent all the things in his life. The chair represents the throne in his life…..who is king, who is in charge, who is boss? This person is like most people we know…..his self is on the throne. He is in charge of his own life. I don’t know whether he is doing a good job or not. He believes there a God. He prays sometimes. He even goes to church sometimes. But as far as his life is concerned; he is in charge, and God is outside.

However, Jesus said in the back of the Bible (Revelation 3:20): “Behold, I stand at the door of every man’s heart and I knock”. He will not break the door down or force His way in, but you can open the door of your heart and invite Him in. His Spirit Power can come in and change your whole life.

That is what this second person has done. He has asked God to be on the throne of his life. And the things in his life are now getting arranged around God. His self is still there, but it is not running things, not in charge, not in control anymore. He will still sin and mess-up some times, because he is still trapped in a human body…..but he is on a new and different road now.

Which one of these two people is you, ?

Which would you like for it to be?

If you wish to be the second person, and ask God into your life, and really be born again, you can do so right now. I would want you to very be serious, and plan for a turning in your life.

OK, I will pray for a few seconds, and then I will say some words that you can repeat after me, quietly, but out loud, straight to God, if you really mean them.

“Father God, we come before you now. And as it says in your Holy Book, if we meet here in Your Name, Your Spirit Power will be right here with us, and we know that this is true, for You do not lie. Father God, this young person wishes to come now and ask you into his heart and life. He wants his sins to be forgiven. He wants a turning in his life. He wants to be washed clean. He wants to be saved into Heaven, and he needs your Spirit Power living inside him to help him. So, he is going to come now, Father God, and quietly say these words, to You:

‘Lord Jesus, I need you. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. Right now I open the door of my heart and receive You as my Savior and my Lord. Thank You for forgiving my sins, and for giving me eternal life. Now Lord, just take control of the throne of my life, and make me into the kind of person that you want me to be. Amen.’”

The young man did pray those words. Chinese men seldom ever cry, but he had big tears in his eyes.

I told him that I wanted to give him a bible. I went back several cars to a group of young people. One fellow had a nice, leather bound bible. He was running short of money and was quite willing to sell it to me.

When I returned to the car where I had left the young man, he was gone.

I went forward through two or three cars and found him right in the middle of a group of Campus Crusade kids. They had been observing him and had figured out what had happened. They were already in the midst of discipling him. I gave him the bible and left.

This is an excerpt from my soon to be published book, as are several others in these posts.

I have already alluded to Dr. E.V. Hill’s insight into how God works. Remember, Dr. Hill said that God decided to do His work only through people. As Dr. Hill put it: That was the dumbest thing God could have ever done. Dr. Hill said: “That is God’s Plan A; he ain’t got no Plan B.”

In that context it is my contention that God used Dr. Teller’s brilliant mind and background to protect America and its people, even with all of Dr. Teller’s faults. He was born in Hungary to an affluent Jewish family. It was there where he was influenced for the rest of his life by the horrors he saw in Communist dictatorships. He then moved to Germany where he was also influenced for the rest of his life by the horrors he saw in Nazism, The National Socialists Party. He finally got to the United States. He was one of the first to sound the alarm over Germany’s work to produce an atomic bomb.

He drove the car for Leo Szilard, his boyhood friend in Hungary, when those two brilliant physicists went to Long Island to Albert Einstein’s cottage and secured the letter from Einstein to FDR that caused Roosevelt to initiate the Manhattan Project for the US to produce an atomic bomb first.

By the time the war started, he was a respected professor at George Washington University, but left in the spring of 1943 to move to Los Alamos where he was recruited to work on developing the atomic bomb.

All along, Dr. Teller saw the possibility of a much greater bomb by using atomic energy to compress and ignite a large mass of tritium or deuterium to cause fusion. He is thus considered the father of the Hydrogen Bomb even though the brilliant mathematician Stanislaw Ulam actually worked out the detailed calculations for it. Dr. Teller was obsessed that the US produce the hydrogen bomb before the Russians did at the start of the Cold War.

Dr. Teller’s mind was just amazing, and he managed to keep it very clear and active until he died at age 95 in 2003. He did this by getting hyperbaric oxygen treatments every month from a doctor in Dallas. I have studied hundreds of x-rays and their dates that prove that proper hyperbaric treatments will also cause bones to heal in a matter of days instead of weeks. It does the same for severe bruises and many other ailments. The National Football League finally started using it to heal their players more quickly.

On my lunch hour I used to go up to Dr. Maxfield’s clinic and visit. He would show me x rays of former patients, file after file. Their dates showed how bones healed amazingly fast. One that I remember vividly was of a high school student from Canada. He was the goalie on his school’s hockey team. They were to play for their Province’s championship game, but he broke his arm in their final playoff game. His father knew about Dr. Maxfield and hyperbaric treatments from his mining company. One of his father’s key foremen had a broken bone that just would not heal. The foreman was sent down to Dallas and the hyperbaric oxygen treatments healed the bone quickly.

So, the father sent his son down to Dallas for those treatments before their Championship game the following week. Dr. Maxfield told the boy’s mother that he thought the boy would be able to play. However, when she went into the doctor to have the boy’s cast cut off, the doctor said: “What in the world do you mean. I just put that cast on a few days ago!” She called back to Dallas to ask what to do. Dr. Maxfield told her to go down the street to another doctor, and not say anything other than to just cut the cast off.

The boy did play, though I did not hear whether they won the championship or not.

Another time I was there at the clinic and stopped to visit with this older woman. She was just fussing and fussing. I asked her what was wrong: “You are supposed to feel great when your treatment is finished.”

She said: “Oh, I do, my leg is completely healed.”

“So, what are you fussing about?”

Then I looked down and her other leg was completely gone. She was fussing because she would still have it if she had known about hyperbaric oxygen treatments. And I said: “You were smoking too much weren’t you.” She hung her head and said: “Yes.”

It consists of being in a chamber for about an hour at 2 ½ atmospheres of pressure in a pure oxygen environment. It just saturates the body and one’s brain with healing oxygen. Where the football players use a fairly large chamber, Dr. Maxfield used a glass tube just large enough to hold Dr. Teller’s prone body. My 2nd oldest son used to go with me when Dr. Teller was getting treatments. Raymond would bolt the end on the chamber down, and then unbolt it when Dr. Teller’s treatment was finished. They could have used much higher atmospheres of pressure, but it was found the 2 ½ was sufficient and that higher pressures caused no better results.

As I mentioned, his mind was just amazing. I would spend time with him at Dr. Maxfield’s place on Lake Kiowa near Gainesville. We would discuss different potential business projects that Dr. Teller had thought up that he wanted me to pursue.

On one occasion after his treatment he wanted a good hamburger. We decided to take him to a county club in Dallas where the chef made great ones. I had three books with me that I wanted Dr. Teller to read and give me a report on rhetorical physics and its implications on his next trip to Dallas for his treatments a month later. He went on up ahead with his doctor and my son and I followed along behind in my Suburban. Much to my amazement, when we arrived at the country club he had devoured all three books and gave me the analysis before lunch.

General Lemay kept our country safe during the Cold War with manned aircraft. As the age of rockets carrying nuclear bombs dawned, Lemay thought we should still keep some manned aircraft as a safeguard. We did with the B-1 bomber that flies under enemy radar and the new stealth bomber. But the Russians could still target every one of our ICBM rockets and every one of our aircraft on the ground, and all our ships with rockets, and every one of our aircraft carriers with a first strike by their rockets. I have been told by analysts at the CIA that they most likely would have done so except for one thing………our Trident Submarines.

The “cream of the crop” in our navy seeks to enter the Trident Program. They get their new Trident sub and then go out and shoot one Trident missile for practice. Then in a few days they submerge for 89 days and get totally lost. The Russians don’t have a clue where they are.

With the help of Dr. Teller and his friends I have been allowed to go down on those Tridents. You stand in the War Room and look down through that long sub with 12 Trident missiles on each side. The sailors sleep between the missiles. I have talked to the weapon’s officer. He said he could only tell me that each of the 24 missiles could travel over 10,000 miles. Each one has 7 to 8 independently targeted war heads. When I asked the weapon’s officer how he would deploy those war heads, he said that he could lay a star pattern over the whole Moscow area.

When I wanted to get some idea of just how destructive a hydrogen weapon would be, I was told that just one detonated at 2½ thousand feet would blow a hole in the ground 500 feet deep and 12 miles across, with all of that material blasted into the air with its deadly fallout. And not even counting the blast effects way on beyond the 12 miles. Yet, the Russians never dared touch us because of those Trident subs.

Each Trident has two devices that just barely fit into their torpedo tubes. One was sitting right there in the War Room since it was too big to fit most anywhere else. If the officers on the Trident think they may have been discovered, they can send out one of these devices. They are so designed to perfectly simulate a Trident sub. In this way the real sub can have a high chance of getting lost again.

To shoot their one practice missile before submerging for 89 days, they liked to do so in a few hours after the launch of one of our Space Shuttles. All the cameras and tracking devices are set-up down range to track the flight of the Shuttle. So, the tracking of the Trident missal can just be used by them, also.

Every sub has a tender or fairly large ship that stays on the surface in the general area of the sub’s location. It has all kinds of provisions and safety devices in case of an emergency on the sub. I have been on those tenders. I have never seen such elaborate showers as they have. They are to wash down any sailors who may have been exposed to the nuclear material that powers the sub.

Also, with the help of Dr. Teller and his friends, I was allowed to go out on the tender ship to observe a Trident shoot its one practice missile. That morning we were in the VIP area with the astronaut’s families and the technical officers for the Shuttle launch. It is an amazing sight.

Then that night after it was totally dark, we went out with the submerged sub.

Just off Cape Canaveral the Russians keep an observation ship permanently moored there. It is not huge, but it has all manner of electronic listening and observation devices all over it. As our tender went out, the Russian ship pulled up its anchors and went out with us.

The tender has a wide, curved bridge or war room almost the whole width of the ship. It was lit only with the eerie red light that they use for night operations. It is a great place to observe, but I wanted to get outside in the front on the main deck of the ship to watch. On that deck was one of the sophisticated camera cages from Hollywood where the photographer sits in the cage that tilts in any direction to film the missile launch and track it on camera.

It got quite tense as the time for the missal shot approached. It blasts from 300 feet down up into the air where it ignites and zooms off into space. I wanted to know if I would be able to get a picture of it; and was told not to worry. I would totally be able to. As the time approached for the shot, there were two helicopters sweeping the area to make sure there were no stray craft around. I was fascinated to see them shine their powerful search lights down onto the Russian ship and the Russian ship shine its powerful lights back up at the helicopters.

Just before the missal blasted out of the ocean, a sailor and I saw this little red streak shoot up from the Russian ship. Then we saw all these flairs going up from what appeared to be from the surface of the water. It was so dark that we could not tell for sure. We, along with most everyone else assumed the flairs were part of the operation.

Wow! That missal lit-up everything. Since there were no clouds, you could follow its bright glow far off into the distant sky.

Later we learned that one of the helicopters had gone down. It did not just crash; it had slowly settled down to the surface of the water in the pitch dark. Those flairs that the sailor and I saw were distress signals from the three officers in the helicopter. No one had taken notice of them since everyone was concentrating on the missile shot.

Eventually we went over and picked up the three officers who had been in the front of the helicopter. However, the three airmen who had been in the back of the helicopter were no where to be found. We searched all around, but they were not found. Since the helicopter had settled down onto the water gently, we were sure they had not been injured.

We were supposed to go back to the port at Cape Canaveral, but we spent the whole rest of the night looking for them. We did find the helicopter floating just below the surface and pulled it onboard. We then spent the whole next day navigating in ever-widening squares searching for the three airmen.

I visited with an engineer from a contracting company who was onboard. His company made the covers or seals that covered the tops of the missals when their outside shields are opened. He was sad about not finding the airmen, but he was thrilled that we were able to recover the several pieces of those seals. He had never been able to retrieve them before. I helped him put them back together on the deck. They fit together like the slices of an orange.

That afternoon, the sailor and I were hauled in and admonished to never breathe a word of what we had seen just before the missal shot. We knew that those Russians had shot down the helicopter; and had for sure captured the three airmen. So far as I know, they were never heard from again.

Late that afternoon we finally went back into port. As we passed by that Russian observation ship which was anchored back there again as it always is, I had heavy mixed feelings.

Clarice was one of the most amazing ladies who ever lived in Dallas. Even when she was quite “up in years” she still taught and sponsored a large number of bible classes across the area. It is hard to calculate all the good that she did.

She was so much of an influence that she formed a large ladies’ group. I don’t remember what it was called, but that group built a large and very expensive building for meetings just across the street from the back of North Park Shop Shopping Center. That Shopping Center is on the list as one of America’s primary stops for State Department foreign visitors.

I went into that Ladies’ Building one time with Clarice, and even though she was a very modest woman, there were quite a few women there, and it was like Clarice was “holding court”, she was so influential.

When I was down in Houston on that first trip to be with Joanne, I went with her to pick up some of her European Royalty friends who were shopping. We had to wait for quite awhile for them to finish their shopping. While we were waiting I had what I thought was a very noble thought and expressed it to Joanne.

I knew that all across America, in most towns, there were what could be called “Society Ladies”. They were usually formed into some kind of a group or at least centered around one leader type lady. I also knew that those ladies did not let just anyone into their group. They want only particular types of ladies in their group. I also knew for sure that many ladies, outside the group would do most anything to get into the group. I knew that this was true all over the country in large and small communities. Since Joanne’s “group” was one of the most prominent in the whole country, I knew how influential that she could be……how many ladies would “just kill” to be on her mailing list.

The thought that I had was not real clear, but I felt that this desire of so many women across the county to be part of the “Group” could be used for great good. Like………what if the group had a function to lead people to know the Real God? Like………what if all of that influence could be used to lead ladies to a real Conversion Experience.

At that time, I thought that Joanne was probably a Christian and that such would appeal to her. I don’t know what was in her head when she heard it, but the appearance was that it just went right over her head.

Then years later, as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Dallas Baptist University, Clarice asked me to come and speak at one of her breakfasts. She was very interested in that school and its Christian influence.

When I was thinking what to talk to Clarice’s ladies about, that same idea that I had iterated to Joanne came to me. I don’t think I had considered it since, but I spent much of my whole breakfast speech expressing that idea. I even mentioned Joanne, and that I had expressed it first to her.

Several ladies at the breakfast rushed up to me after I spoke and were gushing that they had once met Joanne and telling me all about how they had gotten to meet her. My message had not registered with them. They just wanted to tell me that they had once gotten to meet Joanne. However, what I did not have a clue about was that Clarice and some of her closest friends had already totally adopted this same idea but mentioned it to no one. They were already doing what I had tried to iterate and were leading women to know the real God……To have Jesus be Lord of their life.

Clarice was friends before, but from that moment on, she more or less adopted me.

She started praying for every visit that I made to the kid’s prison to present the Gospel to each new youth that entered the prison facility. Clarice was like a very few ladies that I have met in my whole life; that when she prayed, something was going to happen. There were going to be results. She even wanted me to call her on my cell phone on my way back down I-35 from the prison to give her a report on all the details of what had happened on each particular trip to the prison.

But I have not left the theme of this book. Listen to this…….Clarice was obligated to take her sister back and forth from Dallas to Shreveport, Louisiana several times each month, even after Clarice was way up in years She would leave early in the evening after her last bible class, travel to Shreveport and back in that same night. It took all night. Then she would start her bible class early the next morning, all bright and perky.

So, one day I confronted her about this. I said: “Clarice, be honest with me. You are sleeping through those whole nights, aren’t you?” She just grinned and admitted it. Folks, I swear to you; angels were driving that white Cadillac all the way to Shreveport and back!!!

This actually happened one time to me; only one time.

Be patient with me as I try to relate it to you. I was asked to speak to the Chapel Service at the Criswell College in Dallas. Its primary mission is to train young men for the ministry. It is considered by many as one of the finest bible teaching entities in America.

I found out that it was to be broadcast on radio and that only top evangelists and Christian Professors are invited to speak at that Chapel Service.

So, I asked the President of the College why he wanted me to speak there. What he said was interesting. He said: “Ronald, I don’t want everyone of the pastors that we are training to wind-up at a comfortable church in the bible belt; I want a few of them to be ‘Tigers for Jesus’! You know and have experienced, and can iterate those Christian “war stories.” I want you to come and tell some of those Christian “war stories” to my students and inspire a few of them to be “Tigers for Jesus”.

So, I went and told some of those stories. I am not sure some of those highly educated professors who were sitting on the front row all appreciated them, for as I am speaking, I watch people in the audience. Some of them were frowning. And I also noticed that one of the future pastors was a really tough looking dude.

When I finished, a bunch of the students just mobbed me. That guy was part of the bunch, so I asked him about himself, what was he doing to pay for his schooling. He told me that he shoed horses to put himself through school, and I said to myself: “Now that is my kind of preacher man”.

One young man came up and just attached himself to me. He left school and followed me back the several blocks to my office. I found out later that he had one of the highest IQ’s ever found. He could just glance at a desk littered with papers and tell you later (reading upside down) word for word what was on every paper. He had been recruited as a prospective student by all the prestigious universities, Ivy League ones and those on the West Coast. He had enrolled in Baylor instead. He was quite conservative politically and especially as respects Christianity and the Bible. When he took religion courses at Baylor, he encountered some of those ultraliberal professors. So to counter their “liberal teachings” he started “rump sessions” in the late afternoons for groups of students. He wanted to counter and correct what he considered their liberal ideas and teachings.

This got him in a heap of trouble. In fact, they had him up before what could only be called an inquisition by a collection of most of the faculty of Baylor’s Religion Department. I am sure he did well, but he was not satisfied with his performance there. He needed more instruction in the bible. So, he left Baylor and enrolled in Criswell since it was considered much more conservative. His plan was to go back to Baylor and really “set them straight”, but after he more or less adopted me, he never went back to Baylor.

He wound up moving into a tenant house on my ranch and coming to work with me most days.

He was so gifted and tenacious that he started quietly meeting my business contacts and having luncheons in places like the prestigious Petroleum Club in downtown Dallas financed with their money without my knowledge at all. He raised money for wild projects that he found, like audacious mining ventures.

He was so gifted at analysis that he eventually found a very lucrative niche that no one else had found and filled it. Curing pollution and highly polluted sites had become very much the rage. It is still important, but at that moment, it was doubly important. Jeff met and got to know the engineering firms that specialized in cleaning-up those sites. Then he would find a highly polluted site and meet with the top executives of the companies who had caused the pollution. Most times those executives did not think anyone really knew about those sites or cared.

Jeff would not attack them about the polluted sites, he would just let them know that he was cognizant of their polluted site, and also knew the engineering firm that could do the best job of remediation for the site. Jeff would quietly make sure that the executives panicked and then he would get the big fee from the engineering firm for bringing them that piece of business.

In doing this work, he found one area of pollution that was very dangerous, but that no one had yet been able to cure. It was mercury pollution. Up until quite recent times no one ever knew that mercury puts off dangerous fumes at just room temperature. Let me tell you how this was discovered.

At Oakridge, Tennessee where so much of our nuclear work has been done, they have used a huge amount of mercury. When I asked why, I was told that they needed to do much of their work in rooms with a total vacuum. They used the mercury to acquire the vacuum. There are rooms there where most all of the ceiling tiles have fallen down to the floor from the weight of the mercury in them. Its fumes kept impregnating the tiles until the weight of the mercury just dropped them to the floor. Those rooms and whole areas are all tightly sealed-up now.

One of the engineers who worked there had a son who was a classic hippie in the hippie age. His parents never even went up to his room, mostly because of the strange music emanating from it. However, one night his engineer father went up there because it was so loud. What he discovered just amazed him.

This boy was playing music with a big white sheet attached to the wall back behind him. The strangest psychedelic colored patterns were playing all over the sheet. When the father went over to see how this was happening, he discovered that this boy had acquired a bunch of mercury from his dad’s job and had it in a long, wide pan on the floor. The boy had black-light shining through the area above the pan.

The father could instantly see that the mercury was giving off fumes only at room temperature. And believe it or not, that is how this dangerous phenomenon was discovered……mercury giving off fumes at only room temperature.

With all the dangerous sites across America highly contaminated by mercury and no way to really clean it up, Jeff set out on the task of how to do it. He is not a chemist or physicist, but he did have that super I.Q. He found this highly skilled aircraft mechanic and hired him to work on the task. No one had ever taken a retort or large vessel and heated it up to a very high temperature and kept it at a vacuum the whole time and then opened a drain at the end of the vessel and let out the gasses collected inside on to the outside of the vessel without ever losing the vacuum.

This innovative aircraft mechanic figured out how to do that and built a test unit with just a moderate sized vessel and the burners to heat it to a very high temperature. At those temperatures, whatever was put into the vessel containing mercury, like just dirt, had all the mercury reduced to gas and completely eliminated from it and then forced outside still in a vacuum state. It was deposited into a container on the outside and became liquid mercury upon cooling. Tests were performed on different materials, and the results were astounding to those who had never seen mercury safely eliminated from such materials before.

Jeff formed a company around this technology and proceeded to patent the process. He needed a place to perform these tests to show people how the process worked. I had a friend in Denton, Texas who repaired and sold outboard motors and boats. He had a facility with warehouses and extra land that he was not using. I arranged for Jeff to lease this fellow’s extra space and facilities.

I remember one of the first fellows who came down to Texas to check this out. He had the title of Chief Scientist at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. He watched that vessel heat up to a very high temperature and every bit of mercury be extracted and made an interesting statement. He said that he had worked to try to solve this mercury problem through his whole career without success. His statement was: “I can’t believe that I am standing here on this Texas prairie and seeing this actually happen!”

This was happening right at the time of the steep recession, including across Texas, when so many of the banks were going broke. Business had come to a virtual “stand-still”. Since nothing was happening in the finance and real estate world, I agreed to join Jeff and help him.

He had raised money from investors and also formed a partnership with the very sophisticated company, British Nuclear Fuels. They were the company who cleaned up most all of the nuclear pollution in Great Britain, and were over here helping in the US, since we had barely started to clean up our nuclear pollution which was and is way worse.

One if the first tasks for Jeff was to acquire and build a really large vessel and all the piping to go with it. Also, that vessel needed to be heated to over 2,000 F. Not just any metals could safely function at those temperatures. Way more abundant electricity needed to be brought to the site, also.

I did have a full degree in Industrial Engineering but had never really worked as an engineer. I wondered if I could “hold my own” with the sophisticated engineers from British Nuclear Fuels who came to help, for we were pushing the limits of basic physics, clear out to the edge of what had ever been done before. Fortunately, all those advanced physics courses that I had labored through under the famous Dr. Packard at Baylor preparing for my engineering degree after graduating from Baylor pulled me through.

I also was made the purchasing agent for this project, to source and acquire all the materials and very high temperature items that were needed.

The investors in this project were mostly not just passive. They came and wanted to physically help…..people like some of the highest placed officials in our government and even the just retired Chairman of the Board of Brown & Root. That is the company that dominates the building and servicing of the massive chemical and refining industry up and down the Texas and Louisiana coast.

Chlorine is needed in great abundance across our whole economy. One of the largest plants that produces huge quantities of it is located on the Houston Ship Channel near the Texas coast. Making chlorine is not that complicated. You just pass huge amounts of electricity through salt water and out comes chlorine, hydrogen, and caustic soda. All very useful materials. There are other ways to get the electricity through the salt water, but this plant still uses the cheapest and easiest way. They use a bed of mercury as the conductor through which to pass the electricity through regular sea water as it passes over the mercury. Eventually the mercury becomes contaminated and must be replaced. At one time they just dumped the old mercury into pits in the ground. Since they can’t get by with that any more, this plant was just storing the old mercury in big metal storage tanks. They didn’t know what else to do with it.

We took our big vessel down there and did a test to show them that we could safely and efficiently get the mercury out of the material in their tanks. Those plants are very secure and have elaborate safety rules and procedures that you have to go through. When an alarm goes off, everyone must go immediately to a safe room and stay until the “all clear” is sounded. This happens fairly often each day.

My favorite thing that happened there concerned the retired Chairman of Brown & Root. One of their work crews came there to fix some problem. This big, black worker looked, and looked and recognized his ex-high-up boss. He just went into a fit: “Lawd man, what is you doin’ here? Boss, what is you doin’ in that worker’s uniform?” His ex-Chairman was way out of place as far as the black fellow was concerned.

That vessel was later taken to Arizona to one of the world’s largest copper mines. Their smelter was right there by the mine. The smelter had scrubbers inside its huge smoke-stacks to take out any pollution. Those scrubbers had to be cleaned periodically and the residue was just piled up there because it was full of mercury. That residue also had big quantities of gold and other valuable minerals in it, but they could not be smelted out because the smelting process would have vented all the mercury gasses to the atmosphere.

Our vessel and our technology process got all the mercury out and they were able to recover the gold and other minerals.

So, I am sure I have bored you to death with all this pollution story. And I went through all of it as background just to tell you one short, significant tale. We took our smaller test unit up to Tennessee where there is so much massive mercury pollution. We wanted to show those folks that there was a safe way to remediate all that mercury pollution that they have.

We did the test. It was quite successful and they were greatly impressed. Everyone else came back to Texas different ways, but I was elected to drive the test unit back with the big, diesel pickup that we were using. I hadn’t eaten much is several days, so I had a big meal at the Cracker Barrel close to where we were staying. Tennessee is the home of Cracker Barrel and this was a really well run and fine one.

I had also not slept much for several days. When I got on that freeway, I went sound asleep. I must have slept all the way across Tennessee, because I woke up going down a hill and turning into a gas station right on the Arkansas border. This was standard procedure for Clarice, but it is the only time in my life that it ever happened to me.

My whole point is that this is totally consistent with the theme of this book, because I for sure was not the one driving that diesel truck!!!

My big Santa Gertrudis cattle were what cattlemen call “good rustlers”. When other breeds would be sleeping in the shade on hot days, these would be out there eating and growing as a result.

They had another wonderful trait. My friends who have Herefords and particularly Black Angus have all kinds of calving problems. The angus calves have such big, round heads when they are born; they very often need assistance with their birthing. The owners have to “pull” so many of their calves. Thus, they need constant watching during their birthing times.

However, the Santa Gertrudis calves have slender, elongated heads at birth which fill out later. I just left the mothers out in the pasture and they got through their birthing all on their own. Of all the hundreds of calves that we have had, I only had to pull one. I think the mother could have even managed it, but when I happened to see its hind-feet coming out first, and knew that it was being born backwards, I called the vet. We hooked the little chrome chain that is used for such purposes around its back legs and pulled it out with the pick-up truck. I have one of those winches on a pole with pads to fit across the mother’s rear and the little chains, but have never had to use it.

But that breed has one trait that gave us all kinds of trouble. Many of the mothers are extremely protective of their babies when they are first born. Those mothers can be quite dangerous at those times.

The females all had numbers branded on their hips. We needed to tattoo that number in the baby’s ear when it was first born. This was necessary to keep the records for each mother. If we waited, which happened sometimes, and got several mothers in a corral with their calves, it was hard to tell who was who’s. You would rope the calf which was much larger now. It would start bawling and several mothers would rush up to claim it. Who did it belong to?

The tattoo machine was a set of rotating numbers with needle like spikes for each number. You would dial the correct mother’s number for the calf’s ear, clamp the needle spikes through its ear, and then rub tattoo ink into all the holes. This was so much easier when the calf was first born.

I needed to rope the calf to get all this done, but if you just walked up to rope the baby, that mother would try to kill you. It didn’t work either to rope the baby on horseback, because you would have to get off the horse and on foot to work the tattoo machine.

I would usually drive the pick-up along-side the baby and try to get a loop around its neck. Then I would pass the rope back to my son, Mike, who was standing in the back of the truck. He would then pull the calf up into the bed of the truck. That is when the mother would raise all kinds of hell. She would jump up and get her front half into the truck bed and bang it up and down, making all kinds of noise and commotion. I would yell for Mike to keep the baby between him and the mother, so the mother would not hurt him.

Mike was a brave little dude, but that was really asking a lot of an 8 or 9-year old. While the mother was thus occupied with what sounded like tearing the whole back of the truck out, I would slip up there with Mike to complete the tattoo job.

Then came the job of getting back into the cab of the truck without that mother running me down or tearing the door off.

Before moving up to Denton County , I had two ranches down in Kaufman, County, one on each side of the town. The one where I lived was only 50 acres of black land prairie, but the one on the east side of Kaufman was much larger with sandy land with a big creek and many beautiful oak trees.

My first Santa Gertrudis were 10 mothers and a bull for the 50 acres. Like I mentioned before, this was the first breed ever from the United States . All other breeds came from other countries.

Starting in 1910 down on the huge King Ranch that covers a big part of far southeast Texas they started developing what they considered just the perfect cross of cattle. What they finally came to was a mix of 5/8ths pure bred Milking Shorthorn and 3/8ths purebred Brahman, with a little African cattle blood thrown in. This cross, with their selective help, had a beautiful dark red color. However, though they could get the cross they wanted, it would not breed true. The calves would be great, but would throw off to favor one of those parts when the mothers grew up, were bred and calved.

The King Ranch had many divisions. The largest was the Santa Gertrudis Division, named for the large stream that flowed through it. In those days the mostly Hispanic cowboys would stay out in “cow camps” to watch after and work the cattle.

In one of those camps in that Santa Gertrudis Division the cook kept one of their Milking Shorthorns to provide milk for the camp. To keep a cow giving milk, it was necessary to breed her so that she could have a calf occasionally. In this camp their Milking Shorthorn had this little calf. It became somewhat of a pet for the cowboys there. They usually would have castrated it, but they couldn’t catch it to cut it. As a result, they named it “Monkey” since it would always jump away from them.

Then as little Monkey started growing, he started developing beautiful confirmation. One day when one of the bosses was visiting the camp. He told them not to cut Monkey, to just let him grow up as a bull. Monkey did grow up into having the perfect confirmation and color that they were seeking. Then they discovered that his babies were the first ones that they ever had that would “breed true”.

Thus, the whole Santa Gertrudis breed came from what they eventually called, “Old Monkey”. They gave the breed its name from that Division of the King Ranch.

Let me tell you more about those first 10 cows that I got. Every ranch, especially a big one needs one “practically insane” cowboy. One who will get down into a pen with a killer cow and just do things that a sane person will never do. I am not talking about “brave”. I am trying to describe a cowboy who will do things that a sane human wouldn’t dare do. I had one of those cowboys that I will tell you about later.

W.W. Callan of Waco , Texas got some of the very first Santa Gertrudis that the King Ranch ever sold to the outside. He became one of the first big breeders of these cattle outside of the King Ranch. So, I got my first 10 cows and my bull from him. In fact, Mr. Callan and I had several cattle partnerships together, over the years.

Anyway, he had one of those kinds of necessary cowboys. He name was “Getch”. That is the only name that I ever heard, even though I came to know him fairly well. One time, later, on my ranch, a few of us discovered that we were trapped in a pen with a cow that had sharp horns and was determined to kill us to protect her baby. We all jumped out of the pen except Getch. I went over so fast that I didn’t even touch the rails and landed hard on my back on the outside.

Getch was trapped right in the corner of the pen by that cow, and I was sure he was going to be badly hurt. Getch just took off his cowboy hat, put it over that cow’s eyes and calmly eased over the rails.

Over the years, Mr. Callan would buy herds of these cattle from other ranches when he could get a bargain. On this one occasion he bought a big herd of cattle from the Sixty-Six Bar Ranch down in the heavy brush country in South Texas . The owner had been ill and then eventually died. All the while he had been ill those cattle had just run wild in that brush county. The Mexican cowhands just let them go wild while the owner was ill.

So, Mr. Callan purchased and brought that herd up to Waco to one of his ranches there. Naturally, Getch was the one chosen to handle that particular heard. Getch thought it would be a big joke to break me into the cattle business the “hard way”. He was mad anyway, because Mr. Callan had sold me a horse that Getch had really wanted.

So, when Mr. Callan told Getch to select 10 cows to send up to Kaufman for me, he chose the 10 meanest, wildest, most insane ones out of that whole South Texas heard and sent them to me. They all had that sixty-six brand on them, and to this day, I can still remember all their numbers branded on their hips.

Number 54 was just huge. She seemed quite gentle. She had a baby in October, just a little while after arriving on my 50 acres. Unfortunately, it was born during that freakish October cold spell that we had in the late 1960’s when the temperature got down to 5 degrees below zero. The calf froze to death before it could ever dry off from its birth.

My wife and I waited three days before we went down to the stock pond to see about it. Number 54 was still right there watching over it. I got out of the truck, but that mother put me up onto the top of the truck. I didn’t even have time to get back inside with my wife. I stayed up there for the longest time. Every time I tried to get down, here she came trying to whack me.

One of those 10 was a jumper. She couldn’t jump clear over the corral fence, but she would jump up on top of it and break the boards down. She could clear most any barbed wire fence though. One day she went “on a tear” and jumped all the fences until she was over into the third ranch to the north. My neighbors and I finally roped her and brought her back in a trailer.

However, the strangest one was number 27. I will never forget her. She wouldn’t bother you when you were on foot, but she “had a thing” about horses. She would put her nose down in the grass like she was eating, but if you watched closely, she was just holding her nose in the grass. She was not eating at all. She would wait until your horse was just opposite her and then she would charge up and get right up under your horse. She was so strong that she would almost lift your horse off the ground. To say the least, this was very disconcerting to a saddle horse.

I told you that I had one of those “insane cowboys” too. His name was Dave. I am not sure that I ever heard his real last name. He was a recovering alcoholic. He had been quite a hero in WWII, by piloting the landing craft in the Pacific back and forth under very heavy enemy fire. But he claimed he couldn’t remember a minute of it……all “hopped up” on torpedo juice.

I had a friend from the Reinsurance Department of the Insurance Company where I was Director of Investments. He loved to come out to the big ranch on the east side of Kaufman to help me.

We had moved Dave into the house on that ranch. He needed a helper, so I hired a nice-looking young cowboy right off the White Mountain Navajo Reservation in Arizona. He looked quite Anglo, but he was all Navajo. When he first arrived, right off the bus, he stayed the first two nights in our big white house on my 50 acres. When I asked why he acted so strange upon entering, he explained that he had always lived in a Navajo wickiup; that this was the first regular house that he could ever remember being in. He and Dave made quite a pair.

My Insurance Friend got Dave an old pick-up truck. They would go around to neighboring ranches and look for horses to buy at a bargain. I remember going with them on their first such foray. This gorgeous coal-black gelding came running up to the fence in a wild run shaking his head. My insurance friend, Bob, was from Oklahoma , and just fell in love with such wild beauty. He bought this registered Quarter House for almost nothing since the owner could not find any horse trainer who could tame him, much less gentle him to ride.

Dave promised Bob that he would break and train him, not to worry.

That horse broke my corrals all up on that ranch first thing. But Dave was really amazing with horses. A horse can’t buck unless he gets his head down. Dave took that horse down to the closest stock pond, finally got him saddled and put him out into the middle of the pond. Dave would then get on him with the water about chest high on the horse. The horse couldn’t buck him off since he couldn’t get his head down.

I later rode that horse bareback to check the cattle on that ranch since Dave had him so tame.

Dave got really sick one time. He was shoeing horses one day, since I had bought him a bellows and big anvil set-up that he had found over at the huge Canton First Monday Sale which is so famous. It was not far from that ranch.

One of the nails from the horse’s hoof scratched him on the wrist as he was pulling off its horse shoe. Being a “tough cowboy” he didn’t bother with doctoring it. Sure enough he caught real lock-jaw. You don’t hear about it much anymore, but he didn’t go to the doctor until his jaw was locked-down almost “for good”! We only had one doctor in that area. Old Doctor DeVlaming. He got Dave all well from his lock-jaw.

I had to go to DeVlaming one time. I got a case of ulcers from the stress of investing all that money at my young age. At age 26, four billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) is a lot of money in the stock and bond markets. That is when I really learned economics. I just thought I had learned it at Baylor.

I had the wonderful opportunity to be really close with Arthur Laffer and sat with him as he was first thinking out his Laffer Curve. For many years, I met with and was briefed by Alan Greenspan in New York 2 times each year before he became Fed Chairman. Every summer for many years I lived with and visited with Milton Friedman over two-week periods at the Life Officer’s Seminar in Illinois. I was privileged to spend hours of one-on-one time on different occasions with Beryl Sprinkel who Ronald Regan chose to be his economics advisor and guided so many of his policies. And I was even privileged to speak at the Institutional Investor’s Conference in New York with William McChesney Martin Jr. who was the longest serving Chairman of the Federal Reserve (20 full years) and visit with him and share thoughts one on one. There were many others, and they may not have made me any smarter, but they sure helped me recognize “the chaff from the wheat” in the finance world.

Dr. DeVlaming made me feel really proud. He said that down in that “backward area” I was the first patient he had ever had to treat for ulcers. When I asked why, he said: “No one else down here has ever generated enough mental activity to ever cause any ulcers.”

Anyway, I moved those 10 problem cattle that Getch had selected for me from the Sixty-six Ranch over to the Big Ranch with Dave and the young Navajo cowboy. I also moved the big white ducks my wife had, over to the pond near the house of those two. They practically lived off those big duck eggs.

One day two of my bulls got into a ferocious fight with the Brahman bulls from the neighboring ranch. They tore down a big section of fence. Dave went back there on that black horse to count the cattle and make sure the fence wires were back up onto their metal posts. He was just coming up to the heard, way back in the back of the ranch, but he didn’t figure on that number 27 cow.

Sure enough, she had her nose down in the grass like she was grazing, but when that black gelding got up even with her, she charged the horse. He reared up and she hit him right in the chest. “Wham”, over he went backwards. Dave got out of the saddle, but the saddle horn came right down on his wrist and just crushed the bones.

Like a good cowboy, he finished counting the cattle, took the horse back and unsaddled it and drove himself to the doctor, with that wrist just flopping the whole time.

He waited about two hours to see the doctor. When Dr. DeVaming saw that wrist, he said: “My gosh, Dave; why didn’t you say something.” He put a cast on the wrist and told Dave that he couldn’t do anything about those crushed bones, that the wrist would grow back, but that he would never be able to bend it again. But he didn’t figure on one of those old “insane cowboys”.

In only ten days, Dave cut that cast off and started bending that wrist back and forth as the bones grew back. Of course, a regular human couldn’t have stood that kind of pain. Eventually that wrist was almost as good as new.

One day on the weekend I got a collect call from Dallas . The operator explained that it was from the Dallas City Jail and from a guy named, Dave. So, I took the call.

Dave had “fallen off the wagon”. He was obviously still inebriated and said: “Boss, I am sad to tell you that I have come to town and visited the ‘houses of ill repute!’” The operator had stayed on the line and she nearly died laughing. She apologized and said she was never supposed to listen to conversations, but that she just had to hear this one. Bob went down to the jail and bailed him out and brought him back to the ranch.

Not long after that, is when I decided to leave that backward area and move up to Denton County .

I kept asking different businessmen and lawyers in Dallas : “If you could get your wife to agree to live out in the countryside where you would really like to be; exactly where would you most like to locate?” They nearly always said the same place: “I would go just west of Denton where you turn west off Interstate 35 on the way to Amarillo , where the country just opens up!”

So, I just decided to go and be there first. I was able to get this big house on a very lightly traveled parallel road three and one-half miles west of I-35 on this 1,600 acre ranch that I have already described earlier in this book.

After all this cattle business, I am sure that you suspect that I have deviated from the theme of this book about what appear to be amazing manifestations of God’s Spirit Power. No, believe it or not, I am still there, on cue.

I earlier described how Mr. Rumsey Strickland had bought this big ranch west of Ponder, Texas which was not too far west of my 1,600 acres, and how he had me put a large herd of Santa Gertrudis cattle on it. I got Mr. Callan to furnish the cattle. Two or three years later Mr. Callan found it necessary to exchange a group of those cattle for a different group that he wanted there, instead.

He sent some of his people up with long trailers to move them. They didn’t bring any horses since I volunteered to cut out the group they desired to move for them. Among those who came was Albert Day, driving one of those trucks. Albert was a fairly stocky Hispanic guy who was considered one of the finest judges of cattle, particularly this breed, in the whole country. I was so honored for him to be there. He later helped us select the cattle for our Lorena ranch whose “get” (babies) won all eight of those national shows after they grew up.

I trailered my King Ranch bred horse Suzie over to that ranch to do the cowboying. It was raining heavily, and the clouds were getting really black, but I got most of the ones the guys wanted across two creeks and to the corrals. It took a long time, since with what was obviously a major storm coming, those cows did not want to cooperate or swim those creeks. However, I had to go back for one more group.

That is when it just started really pouring down rain.

We just had to finish before dark, not only because Albert and his guys wanted to get back to Waco , but I had to be in Dallas the next day for sure. The huge national convention for the Financial Analysts’ Federation was to be in Dallas for the first time, and I was the Hotel Chairman for the Convention. Most every security analyst and money manager in the whole country was going to be there, with all manner of important speakers.

I had already made the Hilton Chain mad. The Convention had been scheduled for their hotel for many years. However, I had moved it to the new Fairmont Hotel. The Fairmont had two huge ballrooms that could seat 2,000 people each. That way we could be meeting in one while the other was prepared for a meal. Not even any hotel in New York City could do that, not even the huge New York Hilton. I just had to be there.

I set out in that pouring rain to get the last group of cattle. I found them huddled in the far back pasture. They did not want to move. Suzie “worked her tail off” cutting them and we finally got them headed back to the east. By now we had to swim them across really swollen streams. The water was clear, but it had gotten deep.

Just west of the corrals is a deep creek and then a long, high rocky ridge. I got them off that ridge and headed down toward the corrals. Then I started along the top of that ridge. The rain was coming down in torrents and the wind was getting really, really strong. I could not see hardly anything through that rain, but I stopped by this little tree, right on top of the ridge.

I tightened-up on the reins and said to Suzie: “Girl, whatever is coming, we are in this together, hang on!!!”

When I finally got down off that ridge and swam Suzie across that creek to the corrals, Albert and the guys had gotten those cows penned and ready to be put into the trailers. However, the guys were all really excited.

They said: “Didn’t you see what happened!!”

I said: “No, I couldn’t see anything for all that rain, and besides, there was all that wind noise!!”

Albert Day said: “Ronald, God must have something else important for you to do in your life. That black tornado came right down that ridge. We could all see it. Just as it got to you and that tree and your horse, it jumped back up into the air, went right over you, and then came right back down to the ground. We never saw anything like it!!!!”

PS. This is a note to the multitude of folks in China who are reading these stories: 令我印象深刻的是，中国如此众多的朋友正在阅读这些故事。 请给我发电子邮件，并告诉我有关您自己以及您对故事的看法。
我的电子邮件地址是……….ronald82@verizon.net

This is one interesting guy. He surfaced at the very height of the Hippie Movement.

Those of you that are old enough to remember 1967 and the years after that know of this extremely strange phenomenon. So many of the young people across the US started moving west, particularly to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I remember attending the Financial Analysts Federation (which later became the Chartered Financial Analysts) Convention in San Francisco at the height of the Hippie Movement. Such sites and experiences I had never seen and have not seen since. Many of the “participants” were called the “Flower Children”.

I remember going down to the beach there where so many of them hung out. These young ladies would walk up to me and had me a flower. Drugs were rampant, and they also had places like what we would now call coffee houses where they congregated. Many of the young women were going topless.

They were all so very friendly. I did not stay in the Analysts Convention hotel, so I would ride the cable car to that hotel. One morning this one very attractive young lady on the cable car was telling me how she had a job or act at one of the coffee houses. She pled with me to come see her at her “place of employment” that night. There was nothing planed that first evening at the Convention so I went.

The first thing that I noticed there was that guys were going to bed early on the grass around the place in their sleeping bags. They were carefully laying out their banana peels to dry beside their sleeping bags. They maintained that they could “get high” by smoking dried banana peels.

I entered that place and the young lady spied me right off and ushered me over to her table. As entertainment in this place they had acts to watch while you ate items from their menu and had your coffee. The young lady showed me her act on the marquee. Much to my surprise, she was the “Topless Girl on the Trampoline”. She got topless right away and started her bouncing activities on this trampoline.

When she came back to the table, she wanted to seriously confide in me this big worry that she had. She was very concerned that with all that bouncing, her breasts would shrink and she would lose her job. I really had no answers or solutions for her.

On that trip I had rented a car and drove through the Haight-Asbury District. That summer of 1967 was, what is now known as “The Summer of Love”, the enlightened, psychedelic period was at its peak. It most all started in Haight Ashbury that would attract over 100,000 people to the area, quickly becoming an epicenter for free thinking, creative expression, free love, free drugs and free food. Driving through there I was amazed at the sites and the people.

The whole thing quickly spread to Los Angeles, particularly to the Sunset Strip area before spreading back across the US and eventually around the world.

A couple of years later I was in Hawaii on the Island of Kauai. If you have seen the famous old movie South Pacific you have seen Kauai. Most of the movie was filmed there, especially the mysterious, romantic part about Bali Hai. Do you remember those haunting lyrics?………..

Most people live on a lonely island
Lost in the middle of a foggy sea
Most people long for another island
One where they know they would like to be
Bali Ha’i may call you
Any night, any day
In your heart you’ll hear it call you
Come away, come away
Bali Ha’i will whisper on the wind of the sea
Here am I, your special island
Come to me, come to me

When the young lieutenant gets to finally go there, the big entrance and welcoming scene at Bali Hai was filmed right on the Napali Coast of Kauai.

When I was there, at the height of the Hippie Movement, the very ultimate hippie experience was at the Napali Coast. Those few that could get there would walk the 10 miles of trail along the cliffs to the little secluded valley and beach in the center of the Napali Coast. There they would shed all their clothes and live in little huts that they made from materials from the jungle and cover them with banana leaves.

The Hippie Movement grew and grew in Los Angeles along the Sunset Strip. That is when young Arthur Blessitt surfaced. He was a very strong Christian and as he expressed it at the time and later…..”totally in love with Jesus”.

He opened a coffee house right there on Sunset Strip and named it “His Place”. Hundreds of young people flocked to it. It was two stories inside with an open mezzanine with stairs leading up. Arthur had a big 12-foot cross hanging at an angle overhead. Here, mostly at night hundreds and hundreds of young people started turning to Jesus. It was later called the Jesus Movement.

There was nothing at all on the mezzanine floor but one functioning commode right in the center. It was here that the young people would literally and symbolically throw their drugs in that toilet and flush them away from their life.

Others were involved in starting the Jesus Movement, but it mostly initially all started with Arthur Blessitt. It spread up and down the California Coast. Just look at Arthur preaching to the flocks of Hippies as they are turning to Jesus……………….

Thousands were being baptized each week in the Pacific Ocean. Further down the coast in Costa Mesa, Calvary Chapel exploded with growth. Five hundred new converts were baptized each month at Pirate’s Cove on the Pacific coast, as the church embraced a wave of hairy, hippy youth turning to Jesus.

Ted and Liz Wise were early adopters of the hippy revival in San Francisco. Ted was an arty beatnik, grafting on yachts and tripping out on drug highs. Meanwhile, Liz was a regular at the conservative First Baptist Church of Mill Valley. Reading the New Testament Ted says, “Jesus knocked me off my metaphysical ass!” Then, following a bad trip on LSD in early 1965, he responded publicly to a gospel invitation at Liz’s church.

Ted and Liz were soon spreading the word to their contemporaries. Yet, despite their best efforts to evangelize hippies through their more traditional church, the hairy bunch just didn’t feel at home there. They eventually pioneered an independent hristian commune, “The Living Room”, right there in Haight-Ashbury. Located in a 20 foot by 40 foot storefront, they offered food, rest and gospel chat. By the following year they were seeing 20 or more people making commitments to Jesus each week.
I have a friend from Germany who works in Public Health in Washington DC.

He originally received his medical degree in Germany but was very high up in The US Public Health Service. He told me that he sent a team out California to study this phenomenon. These young people who were highly addicted to drugs would be baptized in the Pacific, throw their hands up in the air to praise Jesus, and walk away without having any withdrawal symptoms. US Public Health Service had never seen anything like it.

The team from Washington validated what was happening, but I never heard what become of their study.

That young people led Jesus movement spread back east across the United States. Probably the greatest manifestation of it was EXPO 72.

That was an event that happened in Dallas, Texas in the summer of 1972. It is considered the largest one week gathering of people in the name of Jesus in world history. Many came for the event from around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, but over 80,000 come from cities away from the Dallas area. They came from all over the US and even from other countries. I met military personnel who had gotten leave from their ships stationed off Vietnam and had bummed rides on military aircraft all the way to Dallas. When asked, they said (like most all the other folks) that: “We just felt that we were supposed to be there!”

I had a friend who was the main dentist in Prescott, Arizona who cancelled his appointments for the week and came and stayed at my ranch for the occasion.

Tens of thousands of young people came from churches across the country. Bus companies like Greyhound and Trailways completely sold out of busses. All hotels and motels in the area were completely booked and people took visitors into their homes. One night I ran into this black mother with several children who had no place to stay, so I took her home to the ranch for the night.

Many thousands of young people were housed in the dormitories of the universities in the area, such as the University of North Texas 35 miles north of Dallas. These groups slept in the university dorms, attended teaching sessions in the schools’ facilities, and then came to the Cotton Bowl for the evening services. Many of my Christian friends stayed up all night making sandwiches to feed all these visitors.

The Cotton Bowl in Dallas holds a little over 100,000 in its regular seating, but when all those seats were filled, the young people completely packed the whole space on the floor of the field.

The list of speakers were the top ones in the country for inspiring and leading people to know Jesus……..such as Billy Graham, and E.V. Hill, and Bill Bright and a host of others…..and of course Arthur Blessitt. Many of the nation’s top Christian musicians and singers were there, too.

Those evening services were just amazing. Many people there had never heard those Jesus Cheers that the host of young people were using.

This whole Explo 72 was started by those first young people at Campus Crusade. And, of course, Paul Eshelman was the main person in charge. There were whole special editions of the local news papers about EXPO 72. It was an amazing, what I would call, a “movement”.

Since it was the biggest thing that had ever happened in Dallas, the Dallas Mayor went down to its headquarters to observe how and why it was running so smoothly with all its complicated parts.

When he walked in and looked around and found Paul Eshelman, he exclaimed: “Why this whole thing is just a bunch of kids!”

To which Paul responded: “Mayor, who else do you think would dare to try such a thing!”

At this very time was when Campus Crusade had just come out with their little yellow book, The Four Spiritual Laws, which has proved to be one of the very best tools ever to lead someone to know Jesus and accept Christ. These were passed out to everyone, and there were many training sessions on how to use it most effectively.

I shall never forget going to one of those sessions in an auditorium and sitting behind a large group of Catholic nuns. These nuns were all meticulously taking notes on how to use the Four Spiritual Laws to lead people to Christ.

Whenever God’s Spirit just descends onto a group such as this, there are some very interesting and unexpected manifestations. The huge Fair Park Area where the Texas State Fair is held each year also contains the Cotton Bowl. Many people were there during the day for training sessions as well as for the big evening service. The City of Dallas has an absolute army of workers to clean-up behind such enormous crowds that leave mountains of trash there. Not this crowd. Those workers did empty all the trash containers each night, but they could not find so much as one piece of paper to sweep up in the whole place. They were just amazed.

I talked with some of the hotel people in Dallas. They were equally amazed. They said that when their maids came to make up the beds each morning and pick up the towels that are usually thrown around, every bed was already meticulously made up and every towel was carefully hung up. They had never seen anything like it.

The last event for this gathering was a huge outdoor service on the north side of downtown Dallas. No one knows for sure how many were there, but the crowd was just enormous. The sound system was set up to cover the whole crowd. Like all the other events at EXPO 72, you could just feel God’s Spirit permeating the whole place. It was a fitting conclusion.

The movement eventually moved over to the U.K. Much of their famous music scene turned to modern Christian songs.

Larry Eskridge, Historian at Stirling University in Scotland and later at Notra Dame, estimates at least 250,000 people become Christians. The evangelical churches in the U.K. are different even to this day as a result.

However, all this turning to Jesus almost did not happen. Go back with me to those very first days at Arthur Blessitt’s His Place on Sunset Strip.

So many, many young people were swearing off drugs, that Arthur’s His Place was beginning to make a major dent in the drug market in Los Angeles. It seems that a mafia group owned the building that Arthur was leasing. They decided that it would be in their “best interests” to cancel the lease and kick Arthur and all these young people out.

Arthur had to have a place to continue his work. He was not an authority on real estate; he was a dramatic witness for Jesus. He received wide-spread media coverage in that part of California for what he did. He chained himself to the lamp post right there on Sunset Strip and went on a fast. The young people would come at night and drape their bodies over him to keep him warm during the cold nights. He stayed and stayed, chained to that post.

Finally, the drug dealing mafia group backed off because of all the publicity, but not for long.

Now come back to Dallas with me. I am headed home to the ranch a little early one afternoon from Downtown Dallas. I am in my Buick sedan, but it is not going back to the ranch. I know this sounds weird, dramatic, and totally unbelievable, but it was headed to DFW airport and the American Airlines Terminal in spite of efforts on my part to the contrary. Simultaneously I had this overwhelming compulsion that I was to go to Los Angeles.

In those days they had those big signs as you went in the entrance to DFW Airport showing the next flights that were leaving and from what gate. I parked at one of those convenient spots in front of the gate for the next LA flight and headed straight to the ticket counter to buy a ticket to Los Angeles.

As I walked up, there was my pastor friend, Bill Smith, right in front of me. I have mentioned him several other places in this book. As I have already mentioned, many pastors talk about sawing the limb off and expecting God to catch them, but he is the only one that I know who actually lives that way.

“So, Bill, are you going to Los Angeles?”………”Yes.”

“Please tell me why you are going!”

And he says: “I don’t know, but I will find out when I get there.”

I told him that I thought I was supposed to go there, also; and he said: “I assumed as much.” So off to the west we went.

It was still afternoon when we arrived. I asked Bill if he now knew why we were here and he replied: “Arthur Blessitt needs us. Let’s go straight to His Place on The Strip.”

I had never been to Arthur’s His Place. I saw the big cross hanging ominously at its angle from the ceiling. I walked up and saw the toilet in the center of the mezzanine. And I shall never forget the big, tall dude who was laying there on the floor. He had “Jesus Loves Me” tattooed on his toes………..one letter on each toe. He was oblivious to anything around him as he was furiously writing in this notebook. I asked Arthur what he was writing about, and Arthur explained that he was writing personal instructions on what he considered the best way to cope with withdrawing from heavy drug use after accepting the Lord.

Then Arthur explained the desperate situation that he was in. It seems that the drug dealing mafia, the owners of his building, had returned with a vengeance. Arthur had an eviction notice to be out by that very night. He and the youth had prayed through most of the whole night before.

Arthur explained that it was not essential for him to have another coffee house immediately, but that he desperately needed a new address by the next morning for all their mail and telephones to be connected to that new address.

Bill Smith and I walked two blocks down and one block over to the lovely office building where so many of the top Hollywood actors and directors had their offices. Our good friend, Tennessee Ernie Ford, had his office there. Fortunately. Ole’ Ern’ was still there. He made some calls and directed us down to the leasing office for the building. I went over all the details with the leasing agent, and Arthur Blessitt had a fine, functioning office for the next morning in the most prestigious office building in LA.

The rest of the story…………….

You have probably heard about what I want to relate to you about Arthur Blessitt, since his exploits are now world famous.  Arthur says that right there, that night, God spoke to him; not like some religious types say those words, but actually spoke.  Arthur said that God told him to take that cross down and carry it completely across the whole nation.

Arthur put a little wheel on the bottom of that cross, put it on his shoulder and started to walk.  Many Christian leaders came and walked with him, including Billy Graham.  Books have been written about the plethora of adventures that he had, just amazing ones.  For see, after he had walked across the whole US, he decided that God wanted him to carry the cross across every country and province and principality and island of the whole world.  

I would encourage you to read one of the books about his adventures, but let me tell you just a little about his adventures with the cross here.

He has (as of this writing) now walked over 42,780 miles through 324 nations and territories and islands.  He is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “The World’s Longest Walk”.

He has carried that 12-foot cross and the one to replace it when it finally wore out, through wars, Christian hating countries, deserts and jungles.

He has actually faced a firing squad.

He has been in jail over 20 times.

He fasted for 40 days.

40,000 people walked with him across Communist Poland.

He has been on every major news network not only in the US, but most every other nation.

Pope John Paul II personally welcomed him to Rome and wanted his picture with Arthur.

During that vicious war in Lebanon when Yasser Arafat was cornered in Beirut and almost exterminated, Arthur went right through the dangerous lines to Arafat and told him how much he needed Jesus in his life.

He slept in Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s private home in Israel.

There is no telling how many just common people he met along the roads across the world and led to Jesus.

Going back now……….Just after taking the cross and walking across the United States, Arthur decided that God wanted him to walk across England, Scotland and Ireland.

Just before leaving, he held a rally in New York City in Duffy Square.   A reporter from the London Daily Mirror came up and asked if he could follow Arthur around and take some pictures.  And after Arthur had preached, the fellow wanted to know if Arthur was coming to England.  When Arthur told him that he was going very soon to walk across the country, the Reporter wanted to know if he already had tickets and when he was arriving.  Arthur showed him his flight that was to arrive on September 2.

Arthur said that he did not know a single soul in Great Britain.  They had a long flight that was diverted to Holland till the weather cleared in London.  What Arthur did not know was that on the very day of his arrival the largest news paper in England, The Daily Mirror, had a double headline entitled:  Suddenly, Jesus Christ is more popular than the Beatles.  Then it had a huge side headline:  ARE YOU LISTENING JOHN LENNON?

It was a huge article about how popular Jesus was becoming and all about the Jesus Movement that was going to be sweeping across England, and that the “leader of that movement, Arthur Blessitt, was arriving in London that afternoon.”

Their little group was so tired, not having slept for almost 24 hours.   Their children had been sick on the plane and smelled terrible and the men needed a shave and the women so wanted to clean-up and sleep. 

They gathered their bags and walked out of immigration.  Wow!  They were greeted by a huge group of reporters and flashbulbs and other well-wishers.  Arthur did not know a soul in England, and here he was the most popular guy in the country.  He could hardly keep up with the multitude of questions that were thrown at them.  They knelt and had a prayer.

One of the TV newsmen came up and said:  “I’ll collect your baggage. We want you on ‘Nationwide’ tonight.”

“‘Nationwide’? What’s that?” Arthur asked.

“It’s the largest news program in all of Britain. It’s on BBC at six o’clock.”

“Oh, we’re all so tired. Could we do it tomorrow night?”

“No, no! We want you tonight! And we want you to be on twenty-four hours.”

“How many hours?” Arthur gasped.

“Oh,” he laughed. “’Twenty-Four Hours’. That’s the name of our late-night talk show.”

The news people loaded them and their bags into taxies and on to the TV station.  Arthur and his wife kept protesting that they needed to clean-up, but the news people said:  “No, please, we want you just like you are. 

They all lay down in the studio and were soon fast asleep, but they were waked-up for the 6 o’clock “Nationwide” TV broadcast.  The newscast was quite a show. They had them sing “God’s Not Dead,” and then Arthur’s son Joel led in a Jesus cheer. During Arthur’s interview he told the TV audience that we were in England to bring Jesus and His promise of Life, and that we wanted British followers of Jesus to move “out of the staid old buildings and into the streets and house-to-house sharing about Jesus and helping the needy. Jesus called us into the world, not out of it.”

What Arthur did not know was that Time magazine had just come out with its overseas edition with Jesus on the cover.  That added to the Daily Mirror’s big story to its three-and-a-half million readers, plus the incredible two appearances on TV the night of their arrival made for the most miraculous welcome anyone could imagine. They hadn’t been there twenty-four hours yet and they were known all over Great Britain!

God took one man who didn’t know a single soul in the whole country and introduced him to the entire nation of 65 million people in a matter of hours!

The cross that Arthur had carried across the US was in such bad repair, that it was retired to Los Angles.  He went to a lumber yard in London and made up a new one complete with the wheel on the bottom.  This is the one that has been carried across the rest of the whole world.

His little group headed out across Great Britain and were warmly welcomed everywhere they went.  They angled up along the North Sea and across Scotland and Ireland.  They spoke to overflow crowds all along the way.  So many churches there had been boarded up or were put to other uses.  Arthur and his friends prayed at each one, that God would continue to awaken the country to Jesus.

When they had finished their walk, they returned to London and Arthur preached to huge crowds as the country was awakening to the Jesus Movement.  He spoke in Hyde Park at an event called “The Festival of Light” to 70,000 people.  It was on Saturday September 25th and was an awesome event.   Arthur was the last speaker and he closed by leading the crowd in singing “the Lord’s Prayer”.  People were weeping and praising God.

This all took place in 1971.  Arthur later returned to England and spoke to large crowds all through the summers of 1972 and 1973.  These were huge meetings. They were held in most of the key cities at football fields and large parks. Tens of thousands attended with thousands receiving Jesus as Savior. There was truly a national awaking at that time in Britain. The Jesus movement swept the nation.   Arthur said that he considered it to be one of the most powerful events he has ever known.

So, Arthur continued on his odyssey of carrying that cross across the whole world.  Here are just a few random excerpts of his adventures:

Near Baku, the capital of the Muslim nation of Azerbaijan, the engine of the Land Rover that was following him along the road just went to pieces.  The block was cracked and the rods were twisted into grotesque shapes.  They were hundreds of miles from the closest parts shop if there even was one in Baku with Land Rover engine parts.   There were so very many divine interventions for Arthur.  In this case there was a grizzly old bearded mechanic who took the engine completely apart, laid all the parts out on the desert sand and pounded those rods back into shape.  Fortunately, he did have some piston rings that fit.  Arthur said that after the old guy’s work, when he tried the ignition, that engine purred like a kitten.

Arthur went 11,000 miles across the many parts of Communist Russia.  In so many places when people saw that cross they just burst into tears.  They had thought they were the only Christians left on the planet with all that Communist persecution.

Of all the places he visited, Arthur told me that Bangladesh had the poorest people that he saw.  It has the seventh largest population in the world and is a strongly Muslim nation.  They were told that as Christians carrying a cross, they would not only not be welcomed but would face severe persecution.  However, they were featured in all the newspapers with pictures of their cross.  The people welcomed him so very warmly and were attentive and receptive to his evangelistic message.

In Cuba, the communist leaders gave him a hard time, but the people welcomed him, especially when they saw the pictures of him and his cross with the Pope.

In Cambodia, which I have already written about, Arthur arrived at just the most propitious time to lead many people to the Lord.  In that viciously war-torn place, Arthur was so happy to be there to represent Jesus and it must have shown.  At the airport a man rushed up to him and asked:  “Who are you?”  And Arthur told him his name, but the man said:  “Who are you, your face is glowing!”  Arthur did not miss that opportunity to explain why and witness to the man about Jesus.

In China, Arthur took that cross right up to the highest place he could find on the Great Wall.  He saw many conversion experiences in China.  On a remote part of Hainan Island, part of China, a man came up to Arthur and told him in perfect English that it was the first cross he had seen in 40 years and the first English words he had spoken in 40 years.  He told Arthur that he had thought he was the only Christian left in the world.  He had originally been reared by Christian missionaries from the US.

There is so much more to tell about the amazing adventures of Arthur Blessitt.  He just goes on and on infused with his amazing love for Jesus.  I don’t know where to stop.

Abkhazia  “Awesome, today we crossed into Abkhazia from Russia. There is war in this area as Abkhazia is fighting to break away from Georgia. Denise arrived at the border before me and had already made friends with the soldiers on the Georgian side.”

“A lady waiting on the roadside wants us to park at their house. She showed us a small corner of her living room with crosses where she would sit with her family every few days. They had no Bible and no church. At night a lady schoolteacher that speaks English and I had the privilege of explaining about Jesus and the entire family cried and invited Jesus to be their savior. We gave them a Bible and gospel material. The big question from all the people is how we got into the country and how we got through the roadblocks. Everyone must have permits or be known to the men manning the checkpoints!”

There was no way Denise and Arthur could get permission to carry the cross across Pakistan and into Afghanistan.  However, they flew to the area of Chitral and found people and a guide who considered it his mission from God to get Arthur across the very high mountain passes and trails.  You can read about his amazing adventures there on his web site.

Arthur and his son Joshua were determined to carry the cross on all seven continents.  That meant Antarctica, the seventh.  They finally accomplished it, overcoming all kinds of’ obstacles and finally walking among the penguins and seals and leading people to Jesus even there on the seventh continent.

Over and over in Africa and other places, Arthur has had attacks from Satan, usually from people under the influence of Satan.

Arthur led so many people to Jesus in Belize.  As in many other places, while he was preaching there. A man came in with a machete, determined to kill him.   He first attacked the cross and then came after Arthur.  The police came and took him away, but before Arthur was finished with his message, the Satan filled man came back and tried to kill Arthur again.  Fortunately, the police were still around and grabbed him just in time.  Time after time across the whole planet things just like this happened to Arthur.  He knows more than most anyone how alive the devil is.  Arthur seems to bring out overt opposition from the devil like no one else that I know of.

In the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan nothing is allowed but Buddhism, especially not a religious symbol of any other religion.  However, miraculously, Arthur and Denise were able to get the cross into the country.  They had a tour guide and a car and driver.  It is very unusual for just two people to be on a “tour” in that country.  They did not get to preach, but they led young men to the Lord anyway.  It was necessary to start at the beginning with Adam and Eve and go through the whole story.  The young men in their knee length traditional robes were moved to tears that Jesus had actually died for them.  They had great, meaningful conversions in that high, Buddhist country.  The converts even wanted to help carry the cross across the country, and the Police even waved to them along the road, as did the farmers who would leave their little fields and come up to greet them.

Arthur and Denise came to the Congo in 1996 just before their first big civil war broke out, not to be confused with many smaller ones earlier.   They found the capital of Brazzaville in almost indescribable turmoil.  They had the name of a Catholic sister which they finally found.  She was known by so many there and was of great help to them.  She knew more than most how much the cross and Jesus were needed there.  She took them to a house for the blind.  Arthur had great results there presenting the Gospel to those blind people through an interpreter that Sister Bridgett got for them.  Arthur was moved to tears by the way they all wanted to lovingly touch the cross and then go out and lovingly carry it.  He heard later that the blind people’s house was burned down after he left and many of them killed.  Sister Bridgett was able to flee the county to the US, but actually went back later to represent Jesus there.

So, I have been going through these countries and skipping most and am only at the “C’s”.  I won’t go though all the hundreds of other countries, even though Arthur has let me read his personal, hand-written notes from them.  If you would like to pursue his amazing adventures in them, go to his website and click on “Countries”.

So, I am sure God would have otherwise intervened for Arthur.  But it was certainly a privilege to be a part of God’s answer to the prayers of Arthur and the young people on that critical afternoon when they had to leave the Sunset Strip and help provide them with their needed place that they had to have by the next morning. 

When God decides to make you part of an answer to a prayer like theirs, I can attest that you had better just “follow along”.