Stories of Faith and Courage from World War II

by Larkin Spivey

  He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built.

  —Luke 6:48

  March 26

  Prolonged Suffering

  August Wallenhaupt made it into his tiny raft missing only one important item: his heavy fur-lined gloves. His hands were numb in minutes. Even though he was fully clothed in his survival gear, he also lost feeling in his legs. He did a lot of praying during the three days he was exposed to the brutal Arctic elements. By the time he was rescued he was in a semiconscious state.

  Safe at last, the real pain began for the young seaman. His hands were swollen to three times normal size and were white with frostbite. He was kept alive by injections of blood plasma, intravenous feeding, and morphine. Wallenhaupt unfortunately lost both legs below the knee and most of his fingers, but miraculously survived. He not only survived physically, but he became a legend at the Staten Island Marine Hospital for his perpetual good humor. He even courted a clerk at the hospital whom he later married.

  A fellow seaman paid tribute to this brave young sailor: “August Wallenhaupt symbolizes the sufferings that hundreds of other seamen have had to endure during torpedoings and he also expresses the same courage and cheerfulness that are indicative of the seamen who have been within reaching distance of death.”113

  A close brush with death may cause fleeting feelings of euphoria. However, to maintain a positive outlook through prolonged suffering requires another level of courage. This seaman’s optimistic attitude was amazing and rare. Few of us can count on having such strength within ourselves. The only reliable source of this kind of courage is the same source that sustained the apostles through their suffering: the amazing love of our living Savior, Jesus Christ.

  Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.

  —1 Peter 4:12–13

  March 27

  A Jubilant Mood

  The Canadian ship Kamsack had been through a rough deployment. Days of mountainous seas and freezing rain had sapped the crew’s strength and spirit. Sent to rescue a torpedoed ship under the worst possible conditions, they had labored and suffered at their duty stations aboard the small corvette. Frank Curry described his feelings as this ordeal came to an end on Christmas Eve:

  We staggered into Sydney harbour this Christmas Eve, feeling pretty good about accomplishing our mission. What a feeling to tie up securely to a jetty where everything is still—the crew in a jubilant mood, and I am no exception. Make and mend in the afternoon and we spent it cleaning our mess decks. Duty watch for me—on Quartermaster from 20002400, and I saw Christmas Day come in from the frozen gangway. Celebrated by taking a hot shower and climbing into my hammock at 0100.114

  There are few satisfactions like that of successfully completing a difficult job. This wartime sailor ushered in Christmas Day in pretty miserable conditions on a small and battered ship, but he nevertheless knew that he was safe and warm and that he and his fellow crewmen had accomplished a difficult task under almost impossible conditions.

  One of my mother’s favorite sayings was, “Happiness is a byproduct of duty well performed.” Her point was that happiness is not found as an end in itself. It finds us when we do what we’re supposed to do. This was certainly the case with these sailors of the Kamsack. In Colossians Paul exhorts us to work at our duties with all our hearts, recognizing two things: first, that this kind of effort will be rewarded by the Lord, and second, that we are really serving Jesus Christ with our work (Colossians 3:23–24). If we can remember this as we diligently do our jobs, happiness will indeed be the wonderful byproduct of our work!

  Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

  —Colossians 3:23–24

  March 28

  Was God There?

  In 1943 George Hurley wrote a poetic description of the physical, mental, and spiritual hardships of shipboard life in the Arctic. There are seventy-eight verses in this work, and several touch on the issue of God’s presence in this remote corner of the world.

  Rosary beads are my frozen tears / Will they thaw in future years?

  Valor so common not recorded in history / Ships just vanish, a Russian mystery.

  Dear friend, Jesus, to You I call / Help your lambs before we fall

  I can’t promise I’ll be good tomorrow / But the Bible says you watch the sparrow.

  No one is talking, I hear no voices / Am I spared? Has God made his choices?

  Why did he leave me, I’ll never know / But it looks to me like the end of the show.

  Drink a toast to the bastardly sons / Don’t mention the battle we surely won

  God took a vacation, left us alone / Out in the ocean, so white with foam.

  Oh we cursed you, old ship, you were so slow / But you took us there, where no one would go

  Brought us back to the American shore / No one could ask for anything more.115

  It’s ironic and very human that the seaman would credit his ship for a safe return home, but accuse God of abandoning him. As an unbeliever, I have done the same thing in times of stress. I wondered where God was, even while marveling at the selflessness of young Marines helping each other. Since becoming a Christian I have asked God to forgive this lack of faith and appreciation. One solid pillar of my faith is that God did indeed protect me many times in the past. I try to make amends for my blindness every day by thanking him for watching over me then and now.

  Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced.

  —Psalm 105:5

  March 29

  The Arctic Is Neutral

  George Hurley, the young sailor-poet, wrote of his despair at the death that he witnessed:

  No life boat for me, I die where I stand / Like an icicle, shiny and grand

  The arctic is neutral, it takes no side / All dressed in white, waiting for its bride.

  So much suffering, so many dying / So many shipmates died just for trying

  All of their labor, all of the toil / all of the bodies covered with oil.116

  In combat I have experienced my own despair in the midst of violence and death. I was unfortunately not a Christian at that time. I anguished at the apparent randomness that took some and not others, and felt that God could not be involved in any of what I was seeing on a daily basis. I am not qualified even now to comment on God’s attitude toward war or those involved in the fighting. There have obviously been good men and women on all sides in every war praying fervently for deliverance. Many believe that their prayers were answered. What about those whose prayers were not answered?

  There is no definitive answer to such a question. We don’t know the spiritual condition of those who have fallen, and we don’t know God’s plan for their eternal futures. We do know that everyone must die eventually and that the span of our lives, whether twenty-five years or eighty-five, is nothing from God’s perspective. God never promised to shield us from hardship or harm. He only promises to be with us in every situation, if we faithfully turn to him. We also have the same dilemma as the apostle Paul, not knowing who gets the better deal: the person called to heaven or the person left to face the challenges of this world.

  For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain… I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.

  —Philippians 1:21, 23 24

  March 30

  The Best Solvent

  An unknown sailor was concerned that so many of his friends were wasting time worrying. He wrote an article that appeared in his ship’s wee
kly newsletter in June 1942 with timely advice for any era:

  Have you ever stopped to realize that the best solvent for worry is work? Throw yourself into your job, master its details and in addition to serving your ship and country better, you will be rewarded by contentment.

  Work is healthy! You can hardly put more on a man than he can bear. But worry is rust upon the blade. It is not movement that destroys the machinery, but friction… many deaths are provoked chiefly by worry over matters which never repay the time wasted on them, and which breed a race of brooders prone to disease and death…

  Be matter of fact: first get to the bridge, then cross it.

  And meanwhile, don’t worry whether you get to the bridge or not.

  What does your anxiety do? It does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; but it does empty today of its strength.117

  Jesus proclaimed the same message during his Sermon on the Mount. He asked, “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” (Matthew 6:27; Luke 12:25). The point is clear: worrying accomplishes nothing. It is a pointless mental activity that only distracts us from what we should be doing. With Jesus in our lives we can focus on the truly important things that can actually be accomplished, while lifting those other concerns to him.

  But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.

  —Matthew 6:33–34

  March 31

  An Act of Faith

  Steaming in convoy at night was an exhausting experience in seamanship. To reduce the risk of submarine attack every ship had to make sure that no lights were showing. This made keeping station with the rest of the convoy an unremitting task of intense focus and eyestrain. If an escort ship were to lose position there was more than embarrassment involved. A dangerous gap could open in the defensive screen around the convoy that could let a submarine through. As if this was not challenging enough, the escorts often were required to follow a zigzag course to further thwart submarine attacks. In his classic,

  The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat describes one young corvette officer’s experience with this maneuver:

  A zigzag on a pitch-black night, with thirty ships in close contact adding the risk of collision to the difficulty of hanging on to the convoy, was something more than a few lines in a Fleet Order. Lockhart… evolved his own method. He took Compass Rose out obliquely from the convoy, for a set number of minutes: very soon, of course, he could not see the other ships, and might have had the whole Atlantic to himself, but that was part of the manoeuvre. Then he turned, and ran back the same number of minutes on the corresponding course inwards: at the end, he should be in touch with the convoy again, and in the same relative position.

  It was an act of faith that continued to justify itself, but it was sometimes a little hard on the nerves.118

  We live our lives with faith that the things we rely on every day will continue to work properly: a shipboard procedure, the automobile brakes, our relationships. Such faith is a matter of trust based on experience. The most vital part of our lives is of course our relationship with God, which we have entirely through faith. This faith is also based on experience and grows as we actively practice it. The more we seek him by praying and listening, the more we will feel his presence and grow in confidence that we are “on station,” even in the darkest and most uncertain waters.

  Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

  —Hebrews 11:1

  April

  WAR IN THE DESERT

  The shipping lanes of the Mediterranean Sea have historically been vital to France and England in support of their commerce with the Middle East and Asia. In 1939, even though war was imminent in Europe, the Mediterranean seemed secure, with strong British and French naval and ground forces in place and an ostensibly neutral Italy. This picture changed dramatically with the defeat of France. On June 10, 1940, the day after the fall of Paris, Italy declared war on the Allies. With an Italian army and navy opposing them and a French fleet potentially in enemy hands, Britain suddenly faced a crisis on another front.

  With visions of a new Roman Empire, Mussolini ordered his forces in Libya to begin a land offensive on September 13 to seize Egypt and the Suez Canal. Marshal Graziani, with two hundred fifty thousand troops available in Libya, ordered the Italian 10th Army to advance into Egypt. They were opposed by thirty thousand British, Indian, and Australian troops under Gen. Archibald Wavell. After advancing about one hundred kilometers, the Italian advance was stopped at Sidi Barrani and was then routed by a counterattack that advanced five hundred miles back into Libya.

  To shore up his faltering ally, Hitler deployed Luftwaffe units to Italy in December 1940 to interdict British shipping and to keep supply lines open to North Africa. The Afrika Korps was organized under Gen. Erwin Rommel and began moving to Africa in early 1941. It consisted initially of one light division and one panzer division, and was later expanded into the Panzer Army Africa. Rommel soon earned the nickname, “Desert Fox,” and began to make his presence felt.

  Disregarding instructions from Italian authorities and his own superiors, the German general quickly launched an offensive that penetrated almost to Egypt. He finally had to stop in late May to resupply and reorganize his forces. From this point on, for over a year, the war in North Africa became a back-and-forth struggle along a narrow one-thousand-mile strip of Libyan and Egyptian coastline. Each side sought to build up strength for the next offensive while seeking some way to outflank or outguess the enemy.

  During this period the supply lines of the opposing forces became the key to victory or defeat in North Africa. The British Navy and air units stationed on Malta gradually began to turn the tide, making resupply of the Afrika Korps increasingly difficult. Finally, in September 1942 the British 8th Army, under Gen. Bernard Montgomery, launched a major offensive that decisively penetrated the German line at El Alamein. Rommel did not have the resources to stop this advance and was forced back across Libya and into Tunisia.

  Throughout 1942, the United States prepared for its role in the widening war. The site of America’s entry into the European theater was hotly debated by the Allies. Even though American military leaders favored a direct strike at Germany, President Roosevelt finally succumbed to Churchill’s insistence on an invasion of North Africa. Operation Torch commenced on November 8, 1942, with more than one hundred thousand British and American troops, commanded by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, landing at three widely separated objectives: Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. Ironically, these landings were initially opposed by French forces occupying these areas under the control of the Vichy French government. The Operation Torch forces ultimately met the British 8th Army in Tunisia, successfully driving the Axis out of North Africa in May 1943.

  April 1

  Submitting to the Desert

  At times desert warfare had many similarities to war at sea. The lines were fluid and ever changing. There were no forts and seldom even fixed positions, as there were few noteworthy terrain features to be held. The mission was usually to find and engage enemy units wherever found, with little regard to the land being fought over. A correspondent eloquently described the relationship of the army to the environment surrounding it:

  As a ship submits to the sea by the nature of its design and the way it sails, so these new mechanized soldiers were submitting to the desert. They used the desert. They never sought to control it. Always the desert set the pace, made the direction and planned the design. The desert offered colours in browns, yellows, and greys. The army accordingly took these colours for its camouflage. The sandstorm blew, and the tanks, profiting by it, went into action under the cover of the storm. We made no roads. We built no houses. We did not try to make the desert livable, nor did we seek to subdue it. We found the life of the desert primitive and nomadic, and primitively and nomadically the army lived and went to war.119

&n
bsp; We don’t usually think of “submitting” to our environment. Part of our nature as human beings is to try to shape events and overcome obstacles, as we plan and work toward a better future. Theoretically, we know that we are supposed to submit ourselves to God’s plan, but this is not practically possible unless we know what he wants us to do. We need to remember the biblical wisdom that there is “A time to be silent and a time to speak” (Ecclesiastes 3:7). We submit to God’s will when we take time to pray, to listen, and to seek help in discerning his guidance. He will give us direction if we seek it. Our striving then takes on a new character. Only when we submit our efforts to his plan will we ever be able to fulfill our true purpose and find lasting peace.

  Whether the cloud stayed over the tabernacle for two days or a month or a year, the Israelites would remain in camp and not set out; but when it lifted, they would set out. At the Lord’s command they encamped, and at the Lord’s command they set out.

  —Numbers 9:22–23

  April 2

  To Shave

  Brig. James Hargest, a New Zealander, was captured in North Africa in July 1941. He reported an interesting meeting with Gen. Erwin Rommel:

  He stood looking at me coldly. Through his interpreter he expressed displeasure that I had not saluted him. I replied that I intended no discourtesy, but was in the habit of saluting only my seniors in our own or allied armies… It did not prevent him from congratulating me on the fighting quality of my men.