A chaplain in a whiteout, a mortar, a boulder, water and the Word, and some neighbors

To most people, Grandpa’s stories of his service in World War II are just war stories.  He will tell about how he was a marksman.  He will tell about the weapon he used, an M1 Garand, and how he preferred 12- and 6-round clips over the larger 18-round clips.  He will tell of the service dogs used in his unit.  He will rattle off some of the places he was: Salerno, Naples, Leghorn, Monte Cassino, Mt. Belvedere, Venus, Brenner Pass, and lower Austria.  But until the last fifteen years, he didn’t tell much.  He didn’t like to talk about it, and that is understandable – PFC James Baker was a marksman in the middle of a horrible war.  But as he began to tell more, it became clear that to him, the story was not just of the war.

His parents were not Christians.  A neighbor had taken him to church, but that was it.  The war was when he became a Christian.  The story is rich, the scope wide, and many of its branches are only glanced at and passed by here.

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A story he told long ago was of when he was in a meadow, and enemy tanks were advancing to his position.  He began to dig a foxhole, but found that where he had been digging, there was also a massive boulder that was too large to move, and there was no way to dig around.  The hole was not deep enough, and the tanks were too close to begin a new hole.  He had nowhere to go.  He blacked out.  When he awoke, the tanks had already passed, he was in the hole, and the boulder was lying in the meadow.

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I . . . might tell you how I found the Lord.  That was, I always believed in the Lord and the things that He done for me, but I was over in Italy one early morning.  A German barrage of mortar shells come in.  Usually the first one falls short of it’s target, the second one goes just beyond the target, and the third one is usually dead on.  There was a man ahead of me on a little trail, myself, and a man behind me, and we were about 30 foot apart and we were on a hillside.  The first shell came in below us and it didn’t hurt us because it spread out below.  The second one came in, it come above us, we were lying down and all the shrapnel came out over the top.  The third one come in and it lit in the trail just ahead of me, close enough that it cracked the ground back to where I laid, and it did not go off.  It was what we called a dud.  And a dud seldom ever happened in a German mortar shell.  And knowing that that was . . . my life was handed to me by God from that point.

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I had a gold leaf bible carried in my pocket all the time, a little bitty guy. Whatever happened to that, I have no idea, but I would give just about anything to be able to carry it again, but whatever happened to it, who knows . . . it got hit with a bullet, and it saved my life, because with that little metal bounding on it, it kept the bullet from going through into my body . . . I had a great big black spot there where that little bible was, but it got over it.

The bible had been worn over his heart.

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It was my sister who thought to ask, “When did you become a Christian?”

“Do you know what a whiteout is?” came the reply.  He beckoned to Poppy, the dog at his feet. “When I’m standing here in a whiteout, and I can’t see Poppy, it’s a whiteout. That’s what we were into, that kind of situation. It’s not that our uniforms were white, the fact is that there was nothing there to see, just a blank wall.”  Grandpa proceeded to tell of the terrifying conditions in which he, eight other soldiers, and a Lutheran chaplain were trapped on Mt. Belvedere.

We had to dig a hole to get into, because the enemy tanks were coming down upon us.  Their constant behavior to us was hard going.  And we all held hands together, not a one of us knew how to pray except Chaplain Davis, and he started a word of prayer.  And his praying is what got us into a position where we got out of this predicament, which we all said, if it wasn’t for him and him and his prayer and teaching us to pray, and about three-and-a-half hours, that’s why we got into the position that we were as Lutherans.  There’s a lot more to that story than just what I can tell you here tonight, but it’s old and original, and it’s been good for us.  It’s been good for me.  Bradford Russow, and Dick Cundy and myself, all of us got together and had prayer together.  Dick Cundy and Bradford Russow never got out of it, but I did.  And because of being taught how to pray, what to pray for and how good it was for us, that’s why we became Christian people amongst us. . .  All of us joined the Lutheran Church when we got over this scramble in this whiteout.

Grandpa continued to tell of another day when he and Dick and Brad parted ways.

We had been called voluntarily out to help some of our people that were in a serious position.  And I myself was one of three of us us that volunteered to do this job.  There were excellent reasons for the three of us to volunteer at that time.  We had shell plates and so forth for protection, but not like what we had hoped for. . . The Germans threw mortar shells [at us], lobbed them in.  The mortar shells usually go off at the rate of third one is deadly.  One hit in the cowpath up the mountain right ahead of me, the next one hit in the cowpath just a little to the right, both of those were what we call duds which you never heard of, and I was saved because both of them were duds.  And the third one was not.  I got up to where the third one went off and stood up to see what was going on, which was a foolish trick to begin with. . . It was hard to explain why did we go up there on the third one and stick our neck out to a good chance of being killed. . .  The machine gunner opened up fire and I got shot through the leg.  They got shot and killed by ammo and that’s why they died. . . When the German traversed his gunfire, I jumped up on a stump to see where it was coming from.  Got up on the stump and I looked both ways, both sides, both directions, and Brad and Dick were shot in the chest and killed, I was shot in the leg because I was on a stump, above their elevation.

He had intended to protect Dick and Brad by taking the more dangerous position.  It was seven days before he reached a hospital.

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I knew when I came home that [your] Grandma had accepted God years before I ever did.  She knew what it was all about.  Not me.  Thank goodness she knew how to accept God, what God’s pleasures were to our life.  I knew nothing of her acceptance of God, only that she was a very highly Christian lady.

In 1948, the year after his discharge, Grandpa was baptized into Christ at Perrydale Christian Church, near where he was farming.  The farm was sold in 1954 and the family ended up in West Salem.  Some neighbors invited my grandparents who were raising two daughters by then, to visit their church, Peace Lutheran.  Peace is where both daughters were baptized, confirmed, and married.  And one of those daughters is my mom.  And that’s about half of how I came to be baptized into the body of Christ as a Lutheran.  All it took was a mortar, a boulder, a Lutheran chaplain in a whiteout, water and the Word, and neighbors some thirty and forty years earlier.

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Thank you, Grandpa.

Remembering today my brothers in Christ, Brad and Dick . . .