Plans are everything before the battle; useless once it’s joined” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Forces in Europe, World War II, June 6, 1944, 1:45 a.m., Ste. Mère Église, Normandy, France).
Pvt. Ken Russell of the U.S. 101St Airborne Division tied firmly to a heavy parachute drifted helplessly downward toward the alerted German garrison. He looked right and, “I saw this guy, as instantaneously he was blown away. There was just an empty parachute coming down.” Pvt. Russell frantically looked left and found his friend, Pvt. Charles Blankenship, being sucked toward a blazing hay barn below them. “I heard him scream once, then again before he hit the fire, and he didn’t scream anymore.” Russell took a bullet to the hand. Tracer bullets filled the sky around him, illuminating three more friends getting caught on telephone poles where they were shot to death as they hung helplessly above the village streets.
Behind him, crossing the English Channel in every imaginable type of boat, were nearly 200,000 men coming to join the inferno. Russell grabbed his trench knife and cut the straps of his parachute and crashed to the ground. Leaping up he “dashed across the street, and the machine gun fire was knocking up pieces of earth all around me, and I ran over into a grove of trees on the edge of town and I was the loneliest man in the world. Strange country, and just a boy, I should have been graduating from high school.” Why didn’t those men know what they were getting into? Many had heard from their commanding officers but believed the message was for someone else.
There are a lot of people swinging down in the dark toward an endless night, unconcerned and unafraid. Warnings whistle past their ears; flashes sometimes ignite the darkness ahead. You’re not one of them. Are you?
But planners back in England weren’t careless, unconcerned or sloppy. They had poured their lives into every detail possible. Eisenhower led the way, living for months on only four hours of sleep a night. Every waking moment was poured into the undertaking of preparing the 2 million U.S. troops and millions more from Britain, Canada and other nations. Reconnaissance aircraft had threaded their way through an intricate maze of anti-aircraft fire for months snapping over one million photos of every foot of coast line. Special agents had been dropped behind the lines or crept ashore from mini subs. Risking Gestapo torture, they had smuggled out coded information on gun emplacements, troop strengths, enemy morale and communication hubs. Sometimes the information was incredibly detailed. Lt. Richard Winters of the 101St Airborne knew that the German commander of his objective took his dog for a walk every day at 5:00 p.m. A farmer, furious that he had lost his fields to a massive battery of four 155 mm guns, paced off the distance between each bunker, the surrounding cliffs and the entrenchments. He stored the message in the mind of his blind nine-year-old son and sent it off to the French underground for shipment to England. Planners did all they could to peer across the misty English Channel into the blackness and terror that lay ahead.
What have you done to prepare for the blackness and terror that might lie ahead of you? God’s Word, the Bible, describes an eternity spent far from the presence of God as “the blackness of darkness forever” (Jude 13). Pvt. Russell and Lt. Winters didn’t complain that their commanders were using scare tactics when they unrolled vast rubber scale models of the terrain they were about to enter. The maps were filled with German pillboxes, machine gun emplacements, troop barracks and mine fields. Thousands of men spent countless hours memorizing them and double checking the maps they were putting in their packs to take with them. Have you studied God’s map of what’s ahead — the Bible? It lays out clearly the minefield of sin, rebellion against God, and the only way to cross it. Perhaps you’ve read, “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:2323For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 6:23)). Have you studied that map? Have you taken to heart what it says?
The horror that Russell and Winters jumped into wasn’t caused by their carelessness. Their training was intense but imperfect. Their pilots hit a heavy cloud cover they didn’t know was coming and strayed off course. Then they panicked when they faced anti-aircraft fire for the first time in their lives and began a futile attempt to bank, dive, roll and wildly strew their men into the air scattering them across vast swaths of Normandy. Human intelligence, knowledge and preparation are never quite enough. The men that night needed certainties — there were none to be had. Pvt. Russell and Lt. Winters were leaping in the dark.
But you don’t need to leap into an eternal darkness. God offers, not the best intelligence available, but rather certainty. You’d do well to study the complete map He’s laid out of what’s ahead in His Word, the Bible. Here’s one of God’s delightful certainties: “I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). It’s possible to take a leap in the light. Are you ready for that?
But some people don’t take warnings seriously. Right preparation when a warning comes in is essential. We Can’t Afford to Fail presents the risk Winters and others faced and how they prepared for it.