Simple Thoughts Simple Prayers
Thoughts, Reflections, Inspirations, and Prayers
Simple Thoughts Simple Prayers
Sabotage
During World War II, Hitler sent four groups of saboteurs to the United States to cause mayhem. The saboteurs were poorly trained and equipped, and all four groups were quickly captured or killed. The only damage they caused was a small fire at a Westinghouse plant.
We must be vigilant in the face of evil. We must resist the temptation to ignore or befriend evil, and that we must be vigilant in protecting ourselves from its influence.
This is simple thought, simple prayer. So let's start with a simple question. Do you remember that time Germany started a war? Yeah, that one probably won't show up on your next IQ test or mince exam. It probably won't even make it to trivia night, because it's just too trivial, it's too easy, because we all know about World War II.
Speaker 1:World War II pushed the world not just into war but into a revolution of ideas, of politics, of technology, of weaponry, and on and on it goes. And the United States had an interesting vantage into this war, the same as it had had for other European conflicts. We were invested from afar, we could send provision, we could send resources, we could even send troops to the fray, but seldom did the cascading action lap upon our shores, or at least not with our knowledge. Operation Pistorius came all the way from the top. Adolf Hitler demanded an infiltration and weakening of the United States. He wanted the United States to be demoralized, distracted and made duly hesitant from engaging in the Second World War. His plan was easy, basically secret agents would graft into American society and cause mayhem as strategic locales like dams or metalwork factories that would produce munitions. He wanted them to come over here and just blow them up, truly they'd be terrorists living like regular citizens by day, causing death and destruction by night. It is a terrifying prospect. Fortunately the whole thing was a massive disaster. Let's start with the training regimen. It was 18 days long. In 18 days these not well vetted recruits were expected to become master spies. You can't get trained up at Dairy Queen in 18 days, I know because I have tried. I'm not sure how long James Bond trained, but based on the results I bet it was longer than 18 days.
Speaker 1:Second, saboteur Team 1 hardly got on the beach in New York without being caught, and even before that they had problems. They pulled up kind of outside of New York in this U-boat so a German submarine and they got caught on a sandbar. They didn't see the speed bump and their submarine is just lodged, sticking out of the water. You can see these four Saboteurs probably outside the boat. They're in military garb so if they got caught they would be prisoners of war and treated differently. But they're probably rocking it back and forth trying to get the thing dislodged. It's actually kind of comical.
Speaker 1:Then the team gets to the beach and changes into civilian clothing and one of the guys hardly has time to light a cigarette before he stopped from a Coast Guard. This guy in the Coast Guard just pulls up and is like hey, what are you doing? And it was their leader, a man named John Dash. He gives the Coast Guardsman his real cover name. Sure, it's a fake name, but it's his real fake name, which is now traceable through his real fake passport and real fake documents. Then he ones up it. He tells this guy hey, I'm just out taking a walk on the beach. Here's a couple hundred bucks to keep it quiet. If you're actually just taking a walk on the beach, you don't give someone 200 bucks to keep it quiet, because there's no need to keep quiet a walk on the beach. This is not solid spy work. And the Coast Guardsman didn't keep it quiet. He said sure and said the right things and took the money. And then he went straight back to his headquarters and reported the whole thing, wrote the report, got the guy's name. Not a great start. But it keeps going.
Speaker 1:Dosh claims to have wanted to play double agent all along. Now we don't know if that's true or if he alternated his plan when he got caught on the beach, but after getting off the beach he plans this meeting with J Edgar Hoover in Washington DC in order to blow up the mission. That, friends, is some bad spy work. Worse still, he couldn't even get a meeting with Hoover because he didn't seem enough like a spy. He was such a bad spy that he couldn't convince people who wanted to catch him as a spy that he was a spy. He had to settle for the assistant director of the FBI, and this only after showing him a briefcase full of cash. How did he get this cash? Well then it started to seem like hey, maybe he is a spy, just a really bad one. All this was going on.
Speaker 1:The second group landed in Florida. They made it safely to the shore uninterrupted, and they didn't wear their military garb. Actually they just wore the hats and they wore bathing suits this is such a weird deal. And they hit land and they scattered like roaches Exactly how it's supposed to work. But then they didn't get busy with the work of sabotaging. One of the guys went and visited his parents who lived in Illinois. I guess he just missed mom and dad. There's another guy. He gambled. He just started gambling all the time. One cat just watched a bunch of movies. Like seriously, he spent all his time sitting in American theaters watching America Cinema. The whole mess ended as quickly as it began, with all the spies sentenced to death, though Roosevelt later commuted the sentence of two of the saboteurs.
Speaker 1:It is not much of a story, thankfully, oh. But what might have been? Had the spies been given more time or better training? Or had the Coast Guard not been on patrol? Who knows? Had this been a well run campaign of destruction? It could have impacted thousands. It could have altered the public perception of the war or changed the American response to the action. It could have changed the timeline that America had and when they entered the war. Who knows?
Speaker 1:But I know this, if scripture is to be believed and there's many who don't believe it, but if scripture is to be believed, it says there are forces of evil that don't rush through 18 days of training. Now, these particular agents of death are not flighty, nor stupid, nor hell bent on seeing their parents or watching a bunch of movies. No, these are master deceptors, true agents of secret terror. So what is the response? I think it's twofold. First, we are to resist evil. James 4 says that we are, to quote resist the devil and he will flee from us. We can befriend the evil in our lives or neglect the evil in our lives, or we can fight tooth and nail against it. We can limp towards spiritual death or we can sentence the evil forces gaining citizenship in our hearts to death. Second, we must be vigilant, for one cannot flee what one doesn't see.
Speaker 1:The Coast Guardsman was combing the beaches that night. He was on patrol. He had his eyes open. Where are the access points in your life? Is it when you're idle, when you're bored? Is it when you're tired? Is it what you're watching or listening to? Is that the gate of entry? These are access points, quiet beaches where one bent on destruction can saunter up unnoticed, disguised, and infiltrate sabotage.
Speaker 1:In Song of Solomon, a relationship is being addressed, summarized, described and prepared, and there's a verse in the chapter regarding the relationship that says catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards. The thing about little foxes is they grow to be big foxes and then they get bold and then they bring friends, and what begins as just kind of small damages, probably not even worth messing with, a small leak in the dam, becomes a deluge of destruction. Let's go to work, let's man the beaches, let's look out for what creeps in the night and let's live in the light of day, free from the sabotage of evil. God, help make us vigilant.
Speaker 1:The things that seek to destroy us don't look especially harmful. They don't look bent on evil, they kind of fit in. They're camouflaged and hard to spot. But give us eyes to see the things that are threats, the things that keep us from clarity, that keep us from you, god. Let us be fox hunters. Let us comb the beaches of our lives. Give us a tenacity, a focus, give us vigilance, give us an awareness. Let us seek the log in our oni before the speck in our neighbors and in doing so, let us safeguard ourselves from the temptation, let us safeguard ourselves from evil, let us safeguard ourselves from destruction. In terms of war, we need to mobilize, we need to galvanize, we need to unify, we need to fight. We're told that we'll be given victory in you. So let us march to the field of battle that is our own heart and fight. We thank you for the strength, we thank you for the courage, we thank you for the victory, amen.