I have written about a bunch of amazing people in this book.  Most of them have already died. 

Many were so close to God, and God used them to do some amazing things for Him.  

Now I want to tell you about one who is still very much alive as I write this.  

It is my opinion that God has tasked him with warning us about and to immediately prepare for what can only be described as an absolute catastrophe if we don’t prepare for it.  

First, let me show you my good friend’s credentials: Dr. Peter Vincent Pry:Executive Director of the Task Force on US National and Homeland Security,He served in the Congressional EMP Commission as Chief of Staff,The Congressional Strategic Posture Commission,The House Armed Services Committee,The CIAAuthor of “Blackout Wars” and a Plethora of Articles and Studies 

 To show you about where his heart and thoughts are let me quote for you a few paragraphs from him.  I am writing this on May 1, 2019.  He wrote the following only last week and it was put in a national publication this morning: 

“The Age of Science boasts Reason has triumphed over Faith, and God is dead. Christianity is hounded from the public square, is silenced, or worse mocked and despised, in our schools, modern art, and entertainment.“Christianity and its child Western Civilization are thought so shameful among “intellectual elites” they would brainwash us into their new faith that is secular humanism, replace Christ with Marx, suborn individualism to collectivism, replace thought with “group think,” confuse the just society with “social justice,” and abandon free markets and free nations for the tyranny of socialism and globalism. 

“Is Mankind better served by reviving, or at least understanding, Judeo-Christian values that built and sustained Western Civilization for 2,000 years, until the 20th Century — or by the new “religion” of secular humanism that worships false science and the technocratic state, that dominates society and governments in the 21st Century? 

“Western secular humanists and socialists will vehemently protest they have nothing in common with the USSR, Nazi Germany, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela — even as they embrace atheism and Marxism, shout down and mock the religious, and pretend to subscribe to objectivity and “science” in order to achieve “social justice.” 

“All totalitarian movements start this way, promising a Worker’s Paradise, delivering concentration camps and doomsday. 

“ Let us hope and pray for the resurrection of God’s law and Christ in the hearts and minds of men.”

Do you know what an Electro Magnetic Pulse is?  The last one to hit the earth as it zapped out from our sun happened when Charlie Goodnight was only 23 years old, September 2, 1859. 

Just a relatively small nuclear explosion high above the central US would also cause one.  You would not feel it.  You would not even see it, unless you were looking straight up over the central US when the relatively small nuclear device was detonated 70 to 72 kilometers up in the stratosphere.  However, the pulse would fuse any two pieces of metal that are close together…..like the firing pin in most guns, all electronic devices, the ignition system in any car made after 1973.  In an instant most all cars on the road stop and all parked cars will not start.  All planes in the air go down.  But most of all, our entire electric grid is wiped out.  And this happens from the east coast to the west coast and from central Canada to Mexico City, most likely never ever to return in our lifetime. 

Will this ever happen?  I met with a select group in our State of Texas Capital a few months ago.  There were several analysts from the CIA there as well as knowledgeable National Security Analysts and Engineers, and Military Officers.  Many of us have read the only good book written about EMP, One Second After.  The author of that book, William R. Forstchen, was even there.  Texas State Senator Hall was there too.  His previous job as an Air Force Officer was to shield our large missiles from EMP.  These folks were adamant that there is no other threat as likely and probable to happen to the US as this threat.  Forget global warming.  The following information is from………. Peter Vincent Pry, Ph.D. and Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security.  He was many years at the CIA and knows more about EMP than most anyone. 

He absolutely expects it to happen.  He is almost what I would describe as frantic about it.  It will happen from one of three ways: 

(1) Iran or some other rogue nation will get hold of a nuclear device, sail into the Caribbean on a tramp steamer and launch it with a cheap Scud missile of which Iran has plenty.  They really don’t have to aim it well, just get it up somewhere over the central US.  It does not need to be a really big one like a hydrogen bomb, just a small atomic one.  The Iranians are just salivating about this.  They could then fight us with swords like the Muslims of old. 

(2)  North Korea has two satellites traveling several times a day from southwest Texas up over the Central US.  The CIA analysts and Dr. Pry said that each weighs between 250 and 300 lbs.  They say that they are sure that one or both have a nuclear device in them.  They don’t need a spy satellite to weigh that much.  If they don’t have such a bomb in them, the North Koreans can easily put up another satellite that does. 

(3) We are way over-due for such a major pulse to hit earth from the sun.  It has happened regularly in earth’s history.  Dr. Pry says that the last big one was on Sept. 2, 1859.  We did not have an electric grid then, but we did have telegraph lines. The entire existing telegraph system was fried and wiped out.  It even traveled down the rail lines and warped the rails wherever they curved.  All those warped rails had to be replaced.  An EMP of that same magnitude from the sun very narrowly missed the earth in the fall of 2012. 

Dr. Pry says that conservatively 30 million or more people in the US would be dead in 30 days.  However, the CIA analysts say 90% of the US population will be dead in 30 days.  Without electricity they would not have water.  But you say, I know where to get water from surface sources.   Yes, but the tens and tens of thousands of people going to those same sources would have it so fouled that it would not be potable for most folks.  The CIA analysts there told me that they keep a little back-pack in their cars, mostly filled with water purification tablets.  When I asked why, they said that when their car stops wherever they may be, they just want to try to be able to get back home. 

Forstchen called his fiction book about the result of this happening to a small US community, One Second After, because it all happens in just one second. 

No more electronic devices of any kind would exist.  All bank records are gone.  Everything stored in every computer, even in the cloud, is gone.  There would be no more communications, no cell phones, and certainly no TV or radio.  In that one instant, we would be plunged back into the 14th Century. 

Most folks don’t realize that our electric grid is tied together and dependent on a few massive, extremely heavy transformers.  They are so heavy that they are very hard to transport to the strategic sites where they are needed.  They can only be manufactured by hand.  They are not made in the US; they are made in Japan and in Germany.  These would all be “fried” with an EMP.  It is doubtful then, if ever they could be replaced. 

In 2001 Congress established a commission to study the danger of an electromagnetic pulse generated by the detonation of a high-altitude nuclear weapon. It concluded that while there would be no blast effects on the ground, critical electricity-dependent infrastructure would be rendered inoperable. The commission’s chairman, William R. Graham, has noted that several Russian generals told the commissioners in 2004 that the designs for a “super EMP nuclear weapon” had been transferred to North Korea.   While a regular nuclear bomb will achieve an EMP, the Russians have been perfecting certain ones for maximum EMP effect. 

Recently the news media reported how a North Korean medium range missal was destroyed in mid-flight.  They expressed their confusion about why it had been destroyed when it was operating successfully.  Dr. Pry told me that the media did not understand that this was a test of how one of their missals can go up to deliver an EMP nuclear device and be exploded at just the optimum height for an EMP blast. 

I wrote an email about this subject to some of my friends.  I mentioned the two North Korean satellites and how their paths carry them up over the Central US every day.  Someone got that email to Lou Dobbs.  You have probably seen him on Fox Business News on his weekday broadcasts each evening.  He read it on his program, verbatim……word for word.  And if you have watched him, you have seen how when something strikes him as very cogent, he will look right into the camera and comment on it. 

On this occasion, when he got to the part of my email about the North Korean satellites, he looked right into the camera and said very earnestly:  “Why in  the world haven’t we shot those two things down!”In late 2017, just before Kim Jong-un became involved with President Trump, he made an interesting statement. He said publicly, directly to the United States through a translator:  “If you people don’t stop messing with me, you are all going to live like dogs!” 

 As a proud American, I hate to admit it, but until we at least get our electric grid hardened, maybe we had better listen.  

At that conference in the Texas Capital all those important people from across the US had come all the way down to Austin, Texas.  When I asked them why they were there, they had a very practical answer.  They were most all desperately anxious for us to get our electric grid hardened to withstand such a magnetic pulse before it is too late.  They don’t want to see 90% of the whole US population dead in their homes and in the streets.  They expressed that they are in effect, hitting a stone wall in trying to get the grid hardened. 

They said that since Texas is the only state with its own grid, and since as they put it:  “Texans are tougher, more energetic, and in our opinion more apt to do it than anyone else.  “We are here to try to get you to do it as an example to for the rest of the nation.” 

On July 9, 1962, the US launched a Thor missile from Johnston Island, an atoll about 1500 kilometers (900 miles) southwest of Hawaii. The missile arced up to a height of over 1100 km (660 miles), then came back down. At the preprogrammed height of 400 km (240 miles), the 1.4 megaton nuclear warhead detonated.  We wanted to test one of our nuclear warheads so high up that no damage or results on the earth were expected.It was called Operation Starfish, and all hell broke loose.  

From this explosion, we learned much more about EMP than we had ever known before. There were not many satellites up at that time.  But the EMP fried the insides of the 6 satellites above that area at that moment and caused many others to fail later. 

Even though it was way higher than the 30 to 40 miles which are optimum for EMP effect, it fried most of the telephone system in Hawaii, damaged the electric systems for hundreds of miles around,  and wiped out most of the street lights in Hawaii.  If Hawaii’s electric grid had not been so underdeveloped and analog, it would have been totally destroyed instead of just badly damaged.  

Congressman Bob Hall desperately wants Texas (at least) to harden its electric grid against an EMP.  Here is what he sent out to his constituents recently in an email report: 

There was a time when life without electricity was the norm. By the 1930s, the majority of people living in larger towns and cities enjoyed the luxury, but only 10 percent of Americans who lived on farms or in rural areas had electric power.  In 1936 the Rural  Electric Administration was created to bring electricity to rural areas. No longer a luxury, electricity is now considered to be essential to life. A resilient power supply is essential to sustaining economic prosperity. 

A prolonged power outage today would result in a complete breakdown in the fabric of society as we know it. Without power, communications systems would go down, creating a chaotic response to the situation. While limited locations would have access to temporary generators, as the on-site fuel for those generators is expended, replacement services would be at a standstill. Pipelines and transportation systems would be immobilized. Medically fragile individuals with dependency on machines would be some of the first victims. Those who depend on life-saving medications would be next as diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes, currently controlled by medication, become death sentences. Then, as clean water supplies are compromised and waste water treatment plants are overwhelmed, diseases commonly associated with third world countries would become prevalent. 

While Texas history with hurricanes, wildfires, ice storms and critters has made the state well-prepared for short term outages of power, there has been no significant planning for a catastrophic long-term loss of the electric grid that could be the result of cyber, natural, or man-made causes. The very idea that a single event causing the loss of the electric grid could plunge the entire nation back into a time without electricity, cell phones or the internet is so overpowering that it is easier to ignore the threat than to plan for it. 

At that conference in Austin, their one plea was to try to get us to harden our electric grid against an EMP.  It is not that hard or expensive.  The CIA folks and the military folks and Dr. Pry were here in Texas to plead with us to harden our grid as an example for the rest of the country, because Texas is the only state in the US with its own independent, separate electric grid as I have written.  They estimate that it will only cost $13 per person.  And my main purpose in bothering you with all this is to implore you to do whatever it takes to get our grid hardened; the grid for the whole US.  There are two companies standing ready to do it. 

I asked Dr. Pry what he intended to do when an EMP hits us.  He said that he intended to die along with everyone else, but then said, with tears in his eyes, that he just hoped that his grandchildren and great grandchildren would be able to survive. 

Dr. Pry has only 4 other people to whom he sends his most private emails.  I have promised him that I would continue to pray for him.  He knows that God has entrusted him with the task of alerting our nation to this peril, and he does feel the burden, all the time. 

I encourage you to please pray for him, also.  This threat is not some theory.  It is for real!!!   

Along the east coast of Central America there is a very unusual group of people.  There are over 300,000 of them and they are all black.  They live in villages’ right against the ocean.  There are some in Nicaragua , some in Guatemala , a few in Belize , but most live in Honduras .  They mostly live off of food from the sea…….fish, crabs, oysters and also cassava root.  And they have a most unusual language.  Many languages like Latin, Spanish, and even Arabic have male and female endings for their words.  However, in the Garifuna language the male and female are totally different words.  That makes it a really hard language to master. 

The history of these people is so interesting.  There were many tribes across West Africa over the centuries, but by far the fiercest were the Ashanti .  They lived deep in the forest in what is now central Ghana .  They were quite wealthy, deriving most of their wealth from raiding neighboring tribes and selling slaves to the Muslims. 

The British conquered and subdued all of the tribes across West Arica, but not the Ashanti .  They were so fierce that they were never scared or “cowed” by the British rifles or cannon.  The Ashanti were never conquered until the British were able to bring in modern machine guns in later years. 

Occasionally, though, from the early 1600’s to the middle 1600’s the slave ships would wind-up with a few groups of Ashanti on them.  They would be captured by Muslims coming around to that part of Africa and raiding inland to capture slaves.  But that is when certain slave ships “messed-up”.  Like I said, occasionally a ship would get some Ashanti on them.  Those Ashanti warriors would either take over the ship or die trying, and were apparently often successful.  They most all wound up in the islands off the coast of Venezuela, mostly on St. Vincent by sailing there or drifting there.  Those that were taken to Jamaica didn’t stay, not the Ashanti .  They captured boats and sailed or rowed west to the same islands. 

Most all slaves brought to the Caribbean on these ships were men.  The plantation owners wanted strong workers.  Thus the Ashanti who got to St. Vincent and surrounding islands were mostly all men.  So they just married the local, indigenous women.  That is how their language developed.  The men spoke one word for an object or action, and the indigenous women spoke another. 

For a time, the Afro-Caribbean Garifunas lived peacefully alongside French settlers who reached St. Vincent later in the 17^th century, until being exiled by British troops in 1796 and eventually shipped off to Roatan, one of the Honduras Bay Islands in the Caribbean Sea .  After successfully developing a healthy crop of cassava, a mainstay of traditional Garifuna diets, on Roatan, Garifunas branched out to the Caribbean mainland to establish fishing villages.  According to one source, the Spanish agreed to transfer the Garifunas from Roatan to the coastal mainland of Honduras , effectively consolidating their claim on Roatan and the other Honduras Bay Islands . 

Garifuna culture is closely identified with music and dance.  Garifuna music styles are known for their heavy use of percussion instruments and distinctive drumming, which combines the beats of primero (tenor) and segunda (bass) drums.  Garifuna drums are typically made from hollowed-out hardwoods such as mahogany or mayflower that are native to Central America .  

   Punta, an evolved form of traditional music played using traditional instruments, is the most popular and well-known genre of Garifuna music and dance.  Punta lyrics are typically sung by Garifuna women and often relate to one gender or the other.  Energetic punta dancing has been described as “consciously competitive.” 

On one mission trip I did a one day clinic just for the Garifuna.  It was one of the most fun clinics that we have ever had.  They were so very grateful too, for the attention paid just to them. 

  In a coastal town about and hour from San Pedro Sula where our medical teams often stayed I met a young missionary named, David.  He and his wife were originally from Arkansas .  He wandered around Central America for some time seeking what he thought God wanted him to do.  

When he encountered the Garifuna people he became intrigued that no one had ever learned their language.   There had been many Catholic missionaries in past years, but none had ever learned the language. 

So David decided that he should learn their language and be the first missionary that we know of to them other than the Catholics years ago.  When I met him, he had a new small church and was working on mastering their language.  He even had a radio show in their language.  It had a really large audience of Garifuna, mostly because they found it great fun to hear all the mistakes that he made trying to speak Garifuna on the radio show. 

David asked if he could show the Jesus Film in Spanish to the congregation in his new church.  It was on the same night that I had the electrical trouble with the old bob-tail truck, so I got there only at about the end of the showing. 

David and I visited afterward, mostly discussing these interesting people.  I asked him what would happen if we ever got the Jesus Film into their language.  He was overwhelmed at the thought.  He said thousands and thousands of them would find God and come to know Jesus and be saved into Heaven. 

I came back to the US and called Paul Eschelman about it.  As I mentioned earlier, up until that time we thought that the Jesus Film only had to be translated and produced into 89 languages.  However, Paul had discovered that words like “love” and “forgiveness” only have real meaning in a peoples’ heart language, not just the 89 trade languages that are mostly spoken around the world.  

Paul agreed to do it, and what was so interesting time wise, was that this would be the first making of the film into a “heart language”……….Garifuna.   

So we started making plans.  To save money it was decided to only lip-synch Jesus’ words in the film and have a narrator talk over the other parts.  They had done it that way before, and the way it turned-out, it really did not make that much difference.  So I really only needed to get two Garifuna speakers to California . 

David selected the two that he considered the most appropriate that could also speak fairly good English.  I went down to Houston to meet their plane to make sure that they got on the right flight to Los Angeles . 

We did real well until we got on the driverless rail train that circles the Houston Airport .  When that voice came on with no driver, I almost lost them, but finally got them on the plane to LAX. 

I had coached the folks at Campus Crusade who do the Jesus Film about how these Garifuna live mostly on a protein diet of fish and cassava.   We did not want them to get sick and delay the translation project, so the Campus Crusade folks had a diet all prepared for them.  

About two days later I got a call from California .  The Crusade people said that they had it all prepared what the two Garifuna speakers were to eat, but that all they wanted to eat was cheeseburgers.  I asked if they were doing OK on cheeseburgers, and the answer was “yes”.   So I said:   “Just give them cheeseburgers.”  

So, the Campus Crusade film team finished the Jesus Film in the Garifuna language.  It was now time to take it there for its Premiere.  

Paul Eshleman liked to go to as many premiers as he could manage, and he for sure wanted to go to this first one in the first Heart Language as he called it.  We coordinated with the young missionary down in Honduras and set a date.  I also recruited a really fine Christian oil man to go along with us too, Bob Foree, Jr.  His father had been on the Board of Dallas Baptist University with me when I was Chairman of the Board.  Uncle Bob, as we called him was one of the first Texas oil barons.  He was the one who drilled the well that off-set Dad Joiner’s that established the East Texas Oil Field. 

Previously when we were down in Honduras and speculating about getting the film into the Garifuna language, I had lamented to the young missionary, David, what a shame it was that we did not have a bible in their language to go along with the film.  David said, “Man, you can forget about that.  It is not even written”. 

In those days it was really hard to get a phone call back to the US from that part of Honduras .  David lived in the town of Tela on the east coast.   That was the town where United Fruit Company had once had its headquarters that I mentioned before.  To get a call out, you usually had to get an operator recruited to set up the call and then call you back when she had it all ready.  So, when you got a call from there it was usually to announce something really major……like someone had died or something. 

Three days before we left, I got a phone call from David.  I was so worried that he was calling to report some tragedy had happened.  Instead he said, “Ron, you won’t believe what has happened.  This lady has walked out of the jungle up in Guatemala and come down here with a bunch of bibles in the Garifuna language.”  I said, “How can that be”?  David explained that she had started with Wycliffe Bible Translators 27 years ago to put a bible into the Garifuna language.  With Wycliffe they had a rule that you are supposed to stop if you lose your partner, and even though she lost her’s, they let her stay on in their compound and finish.  I later learned from the Wycliffe people that if you can start with a language that has never been written, and put it into written form for the first time, you can use the phonetics of the language.  In this way, when it is done correctly, the speakers of that language can learn to read very easily. 

Just consider this timing.  This lady shows up with bibles she started on 27 years before, just one week before the premiere of the Jesus Film in that language.  You can call it a fortuitous coincidence.  I call it the amazing timing of God. 

David wanted the first showing to be in a Garifuna village down the coast from Tela.  Many Garifuna lived there, but it was so remote that it could only be reached by going over the mountains with great difficulty in a four wheeled drive vehicle with a very high center.  We loaded the generator and projector and film into a dugout canoe with an outboard motor and all piled in as a preferred way to go.  

We finally reached the village, and beached through the surf.   It was amazingly beautiful.  All the ground was covered with a vivid green grass that only grew about an inch high and appeared to be perfectly mowed in all directions.  The whole place was shaded by tall coconut palms, and there were beautiful little waterways meandering through the whole village. 

 We rested in hammocks until it got dark.  We brought food for dinner, but one of the kids in the village caught a big iguana to roast for us. 

As was expected, they were just amazed to have a film in their heart language.  Like we did with the Hispanics, we showed it on a big white sheet so they could sit on both sides of the sheet for viewing.   You could just feel God’s Spirit there permeating the crowd. 

The lady from Maine who had spent 27 years translating for the Garifuna a Bible into their “heart language” wanted to be there for this first showing of the film in this very remote village.  David’s wife was able to get her there over the treacherous mountain roads in their 4-wheel drive jeep. 

There is that part in the film where Jesus has Peter throw out his net on the right side of the boat and Peter and his fellow fishermen bring in so many fish that the boat is just filled.   Wow!  That caused a huge commotion among those fish conscious Garifuna.  There is another place in the film where this cute little girl looks right into the camera and says some words.  The folks in California had her use a special idiom that is unique to the Garifulna language.  The crowd just couldn’t stop laughing at that. 

At the end when the film gives you a chance to ask Jesus into your heart and life, most all the crowd sincerely wanted to do so.  With one of the English speaking Graifuna translating, Paul Eshleman himself did the counseling, and those people were so filled with God’s Spirit that they did not want to stop.  They wanted to start a Christian church, right there.  David promised to come back and help them do exactly that.  

 By now the surf and waves were much higher, but we managed to get back to Tela safely, although at some Campus Crusade meetings later, Paul accused me of trying to drown him that night. 

We showed the film several more times to different Garifuna groups, but the last showing in La Ceiba was the most dramatic.   La Ceiba is farther down the coast from San Pedro Sula and Tela, toward Nicaragua .  It has a port and limited commercial air service.  It also has a large Garifuna population, concentrated on its western side.

 We arrived fairly early before dark and had plenty of time to set up the big white sheet/screen and get the projector and speakers well positioned.  We selected a big open soccer field for the showing. 

The lady who translated the bible into Garifuna went with us.  She brought a supply of those bibles. 

I was fascinated watching her visit with a large group of mostly Garifuna children.  She was teaching them to read their language right there.  But those kids kept looking at her mouth.  They just could not believe that their language was coming out of this very white lady’s mouth.  She was originally from the State of Maine , and she was very white from being closed-up inside all those years doing the translation. 

While waiting, I kept going over and over in my mind that she had started translating 27 years before, and here she was at what turned out to be a crowd of Garifunas at one of the premiere showings of the Jesus Film in their language with her just finished bibles.  This would be the primary place and optimum time for their distribution, and their printing had just been finished on time for this occasion after 27 years.  I just know that was God’s plan working as I mentioned before. 

The showing was a huge success with hundreds of children sitting right up front on both sides of the screen.  I don’t know how many prayed to accept Christ and come forward for counseling, but it was hundreds.   Paul and David handled the counseling.  The young man with the blue shades who spoke Jesus part in this version of the film was also there and helped with the counseling.  He had acquired these treasured blue sun-glasses while in California. He had gotten much closer to the Lord as one would expect after living those weeks in California with those wonderful Campus Crusade folks. 

As we were finishing up late that evening, I saw something that I had never seen before and have never seen since.  Paul Eschleman, standing out in that field, broke down in a wave of tears.  Sure, there had been a lot of pressure counseling all those people, but that was not why.  Later he told me. 

Paul had thought that the young man with the blue shades would go on and pastor some of the Garifuna groups.  He had expressed a desire to do so, but out in that field, in the dark, he had asked Paul how much money Paul was going to give him to do it.   Maybe it was because of the occasion and all those people accepting Christ, but that just devastated Paul.  Paul had assumed that the young man had higher or deeper motives in his heart. 

A year later I was back in Tela, two days in advance of another medical team.  With the help of the only local doctor we needed to select the optimum sites for the clinics.  That afternoon after the doctor and I had finished, I was walking back to that compound that had formerly been the headquarters for United Fruit.  It was now a hotel/resort on the beach where we stayed so many times and was great for housing the medical teams with its great food and contiguous beach as I have mentioned.

I hope Paul reads this.  I know he will be thrilled and gratified to find that this dude had “really come around” after all. 

But, unfortunately, there is more to this story.  Before we left for the States, I said to the group:  “We had better be careful.  We all know how powerful the Devil is.  He has had a strong hold on these people for many generations.  And here we are down here breaking his hold on them.”   He will not be pleased! 

Little did I know! 

When we arrived back in the Dallas airport Paul got the message that his daughter had been overcome by a strange infection and was dying.  It later took Billy Graham, his whole staff, Dr. Bill Bright and a host of Campus Crusade folks to pray that girl back from death. 

The fine Christian Dallas oil man had told us on the trip how thrilled he was that his wife had finally recently conquered years of alcoholism.  He had been praying for her for years.  But she was not there to meet him at the airport.  She was drunk again and passed-out on the floor at home. 

And my wife was not there to meet me.  She had run off with a homeopathic doctor to Oklahoma with our four children and filed for divorce. 

Welcome home from ministering to the Garifuna! 

Ella Graham lived west of Waco , west of Crawford right close to where George Bush’s ranch is now located.  She was a good family friend and totally blind.  She went blind when she was only 4 years of age.  She thought that she could remember colors but was not sure.  She was in her early 70’s and had been the first blind school teacher ever in Texas in the little Crawford high school. 

She was very cultured and very romantic.  Even at her age she was still a beautiful white-haired lady.  When she was a student at Baylor they say she was just gorgeous.  Though the young men just lined-up to read her lessons to her back then, she never married.  She said that she felt that being blind, she would have been too much of a burden on a husband. 

But she was such a romantic person that she had gotten her degree at Baylor in Browning.   You know, Elizabeth and Barrett Browning the famous poets who wrote all those romantic poems and that romantic prose. Surely you have read it or heard it…….. like Elizabeth ’s Sonnet 43 as she wrote to her lover, Robert………. 

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.   I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace.  I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.   I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.  I love thee with the passion put to use in my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.  I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.” 

Wow!  Now that’s romantic!  And Robert Browning’s famous poem/song………Pippa Passes…….as innocent Pippa sings as she passes by……    

The year’s at the spring 
    And day’s at the morn; 
    Morning’s at seven; 
    The hillside’s dew-pearled; 
    The lark’s on the wing; 
    The snail’s on the thorn: 
    God’s in His heaven— 
    All’s right with the world!

The famous Browning Library at Baylor has a bronze statue of Pippa out in front of it, and inside it has all the memorabilia of the Brownings’…….most all of their complete works and even their actual desks from which their writings were done.

Yes, Miss Ella was such a romantic.  She wrote to me on an old typewriter with blue ink ribbon.  Her prose was like reading poetry.  I have kept all of her letters.   Many times when I would have a date with one of those beautiful Baylor girls, I would drive out to Crawford and take her along with us.  She would so enjoy it.  The girls would not mind as she lightly looked them over with her fingers.  She was always so interested in their hands.  She judged them some way or other by how their fingers were shaped.

She would particularly enjoy it when we would take her to the movies.  I think it was because this was something blind ladies never did. 

So, one time she was visiting our home at Rainbow Lake .  It was late in the afternoon.  We were sitting in front of that big picture window that looked down over the lake.  The other windows were wide open to let in the lovely Spring air.  And this daddy Cardinal was just singing his Springtime song at the top of his voice.

See, Miss Ella just loved Cardinals.  They would sing to her outside her bedroom windows near Crawford.  She would mention it sometimes in her letters as she was typing.  Her lovely stationary even had a picture of a red daddy Cardinal at the top of it.

Then, as we were listening to the bird’s song, Miss Ella said:  “Oh, Ronny, I do so wish that I could see a Cardinal!” 

And I must have just prayed, for I distinctly remember thinking:  “Lord, why can’t this lovely, Godly woman see a Cardinal?”

But I was jolted to attention, for my mother called to me to go out to the boat house and get some meat for supper out of the freezer.  I jumped-up and went out the kitchen door and opened the side door to the boat house.   Someone had left one of the big garage-type doors up off the floor for a few inches.  And this bird had gotten into the closed boat house.  There on the floor, right in front of the freezer was this gorgeous, scarlet Cardinal. 

He didn’t bolt up and fly against the glass windows as one would expect.  He just let me catch him.

Of course, I forgot about the meat and took him right back into the house.  Miss Ella got to carefully and lovingly see a real live Cardinal.  Her delicate fingers traced its whole body, especially that beautiful peak on its head from which it gets its name.

We eventually took it back outside and she let it go and it flew softly away.

Now you can say that was just a fortunate accident, but I know with the perfect timing and all, exactly where that bright red Cardinal really came from.   It was no accident for that bird to be right there at that exact moment just for Miss Ella to “see”.

This is a note to the multitude of folks in China who are reading these stories:

如果你在中国读到这篇文章，请给我发一封电子邮件，告诉我你的名字和关于你自己的一些事情。 也请发一下…… ronald82@verizon.net 非常感谢！

The famous King Ranch in south Texas has had some famous race horses over the years.  They have won six Triple Crown Races……Two Kentucky Derbies, one Preakness and three Belmont Stakes.  One of their Kentucky Derby winners, “Bold Venture” remains the only Kentucky Derby Winner to ever sire two other Kentucky Derby winners. 

However, most of the horses they breed down there are what we call “Using Horses”, those that are bred to handle and work cattle. 

My favorite and most faithful and useful horse ever was a mare from the King Ranch.  Her name was “Suzie”, that I have mentioned earlier.  I got her when she was still quite young.  She could work all day long and still have plenty of energy and spirit.  I bred her only one time (to my famous stud horse) and she produced a beautiful, Chestnut foal. 

She had incredible ability as a cutting horse.  Have you have ever watched a cutting horse competition?  At the big ones the money prizes for the winners are huge.  They use a group of yearling cattle who want to stick together.  Then the competitor horse eases into the group and selects one animal.  It then eases it away from the group.  As the yearling usually in desperate fashion tries to get back into the group, the cutting horse competitor faces the yearling and keeps it away from the group. 

The judge of the competition grades the competing horses on how well they complete that task and how efficient and classical their movements are.  When the yearling darts to one side, trying to get back into its group, the cutting horse bounces its front legs in that direction and then cuts the yearling off and back away from the group. 

I have always thought that it looks really awkward when the horse has to bounce its front legs to the side to get into position to cut the yearling back off from the group.  My Suzie never fooled with that bouncing of her front legs.  She would just whirl quickly completely around to get into the proper position to keep whatever animal we were cutting out, away from the heard.  I never taught her to do that.  It just came natural to her.  She was not going to let that animal get back into the heard, and I thought it was way more efficient for her to whirl around that way, also.  However, you had better be seated well into that saddle or she would leave you in mid-air and on the way to the ground. 

On most cattle ranches in Texas we plant wheat or oats in the Fall.  As this crop grows up all winter, it provides green grazing for the cattle in the winter months.  We would then either let the cattle graze the crop out in the spring, or take them off if there was plenty of rain and let the crop grow up and harvest the grain in the early Summer. 

On my 1,600 acre ranch near Denton one year we had a nice wheat crop growing on the plowed field way on the west side of the ranch.  It was at least a mile from the ranch house and corrals across that big prairie-grass field to the wheat.  You could drive a pick-up all over that grass field, but you had to be especially careful after a rain to avoid the many buffalo wallows in it.  Of course, the wild buffalo were all gone, but they had left these fairly deep depressions where they had wallowed in the dust and the mud.  Over the centuries they had carried off the dust and mud in their furry hides and left these deep depressions. 

Anyway, one morning a cowhand and I were on horseback to take a herd of cattle across that prairie grass field to graze on the nice green wheat.  We got them there and made sure that there was plenty of salty mineral for them.  You couldn’t just put them completely on the green wheat without plenty of mineral or they would bloat and die.  You needed salt in the mineral so they would not lick up too much of it. 

So, we were coming back the mile across that prairie-grass field and admiring the Fall colors since that field looked down on most of the surrounding countryside.  

Suddenly this huge bobcat jumped up right under our horses.  I am sure it was there to get one of the several newborn calves.  We would try to have the calves born in the early winter so that they could have access to the Spring grass at their maximum growth period, later. 

Suzie just bolted forward and cut that big cat back.  I had nothing to do with it.  It was just instinct from her genes to cut an animal back that was running away at high speed.  Then the cowboy’s horse cut the cat back toward us.  This went on, back and forth for some time until that big bobcat just stopped and sulked right there in the grass.  There were almost no trees in that big field.

I told the cowboy to stay right there with the cat, and I would go to the house and get a shotgun. 

I got a 12 gage with high-velocity number 6 shot and came all the way back. 

That cat had not moved.

I had never shot a high-velocity shotgun load from off of Suzie’s back.  She was so dependable, that I am sure everything would have been all right.   However, I eased out of the saddle to shoot from the ground.   Whenever you dropped her reins to the ground, she would stay right there. 

So, I walked toward the cat.  I wanted to get as close as possible, since number 6 shot are not that large.  When that cat saw me on the ground, and not on horseback……..zoom, here he came right at me.  Scary! I shot him coming full speed, “head on”!!! 

That dude was so big and impressive that I had him mounted.  He made a nice addition to my Den.  

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.