April 20
During a lull in the North African campaign, Gen. George Patton escorted a British general on a tour of his frontline units. He was not slow to brag on his men and equipment. At one point the generals came up to a crew working on a vehicle known as a half-track. Sgt. Bob Bishop was underneath the vehicle, making repairs.
He and the other men present heard General Patton explain the vehicle’s superb mobility, great firepower, and armor that could stop almost anything.
“Isn’t that right, Sergeant?” asked General Patton.
“No, sir,” said Sergeant Bishop, getting up. He walked around to the other side of the half-track, the generals following him, and he pointed up.
“You see this hole? One bullet from a strafer. One bullet, pierced the armor here, rattled around inside, and killed Private Torgerson. The men call it the ‘Purple Heart Box,’ sir.”
General Patton turned pale and quickly escorted General Alexander somewhere else.145
The truth sometimes hurts. It was certainly dismaying to the general to have it thrown in his face. Most of us would probably have been a little more tactful or even supportive of the views of such an exalted leader. This tendency is one of the great problems of anyone in authority, whether in the military, business, church, or family. When approaching the boss, many tend to cushion the bad news or paint a rosier picture than is warranted. Worse still, many leaders consciously or unconsciously promote this kind of behavior. The truth does sometimes hurt. But the truth is necessary for any group to effectively deal with its problems. Facing the truth is even more vital to our individual spiritual health.
But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.
April 21
By early 1943 the United States had been at war for just over a year. So far on the home front the war was remote and felt mainly as a void, with the absence of many friends, family members, and consumer goods. Little was known about the details of early setbacks in North Africa. The battle for control of the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia was fought in late February and proved disastrous for the Allied forces. There was no inkling of this at home until the Western Union telegrams began to arrive. Particularly hard hit was the little Iowa town of Red Oak, population 5,600.
On March 6 more than two dozen telegrams arrived, almost at the same time, with the dreaded words: “The Secretary of the Army desires me to express his regret that your son…” A historian described the effect on this small town: On March 11, the Express printed a headline no one could dispute: “SW Iowa Is Hit Hard.” The photographs of missing boys just from Red Oak filled four rows above the fold on page one. “War consciousness mounted hourly in Red Oak, stunned by the flood of telegrams this week,” the article began. The busiest man in town was a boy, sixteen-year-old Billie Smaha, who delivered wires for Western Union. “They kind of dreaded me,” Billie later told the Saturday Evening Post. A New York Herald-Tribune reporter calculated that “if New York City were to suffer losses in the same proportion… its casualty list would include more than 17,000 names.”146
Red Oak was a microcosm of what was happening across the nation. Instead of an abstraction, war had finally become real. Instead of newsreels of ships and tanks and newspapers with maps and arrows, war had become a matter of dead, wounded, and missing boys. War was finally experienced by the American public for the human disaster that it was then and will always continue to be.
He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire. “Be still, and know that I am God.“
April 22
Maj. Gen. Terry Allen was a division commander during the North African campaign. He was third generation Army and raised by his father to be a soldier. The young Allen was “Saddle-hardened before he was ten,” and learned “to ride, smoke, chew, cuss and fight at the earliest possible age.”147 Later on, hard drinking became another characteristic, and this got him into trouble. It came to the attention of Generals Marshall and Eisenhower that the attitude toward alcohol was somewhat loose within Allen’s division and that Allen himself was drinking too much. Allen was warned about the problem and had an encounter with General Patton, who didn’t care for Allen’s rather loose interpretation of uniform regulations.
As Allen was about to go into battle, he tried to prepare himself by purging some of these stains. He described this in a letter to his wife explaining how he burned various personal records, including the letter in which Marshall had warned him about excessive drinking. By incinerating “all that stuff,” Allen told his wife, he hoped to purge all “rancor or ill-will in my mind or in my heart.” The little fire was like a rite of purification to give himself a clean slate going into combat.148
This story reminds me of a little ceremony that I once experienced during a regular church service. Each person was asked to write down the one thing that he or she most regretted having done. Later in the service we were invited forward to give these little pieces of paper to God and to throw them into a fire beneath the cross, where they were consumed. This act was to dramatize how God will remove any stain if, through his Son, we confess it and ask for his forgiveness. It was a powerful reminder of God’s grace and of our standing as adopted children in his family. Through Jesus Christ, and him alone, we always have the opportunity to gain a clean slate.
He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.
April 23
