Tuesday, September 18, 2012

For Now, This Is All I Can do.....

In September 1939, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Polish men, women, and children were rounded up and placed in ghettos and concentration camps. Thousands were forced into slave labor producing war materials to help to Nazis win World War2.

Later in the war, American bombers began pounding German oil fields, factories, and cities. The Nazis responded by firing anti-aircraft shells at high altitudes at the bombers. The shells would explode at the determined altitude and the schrapnel, called flak, would rip planes and airmen to schreds.

Aircrews started noticing that a more than normal of these shells did not explode. They would slam into the aircraft and then.........nothing. One day a shell burst through the fuselage of an American Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress carrying a crew of about a  dozen young American boys.

The shell did not explode. the young crew brought the unexploded ordinance back to it's base in England, where it was carefully examined and taken apart.

Inside the hollow area where the gunpowder that caused the shell to explode was supposed to be, was actually a  small note instead. The note was written by a Polish man or woman working under slave labor in a Nazi factory producing these anti-aircraft shells.

The note read, "For now this is all I can do"......

The person who wrote that note could not fly a bomber or a fighter plane, they could not shoulder a rifle, or lead an army to liberate Europe and save democracy, but what they could do was save the lives of young Americans trying to make it back home by making a faulty bomb.

Most of us can not be a Billy Graham, a Martin Luther King, or a Churchill, but we can all do something. and that's the way I see it.....

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