I read an amazing story of how God intervened in WWII when the Nazi Luftwaffe was bombarding Britain. A story that you may not hear in any of the mainline history books. Britain in 1940 was virtually standing alone, fighting this horror. Most of Europe had already fallen to the Nazis. The British Royal Air Force (RAF) was quite out-numbered. Yet they were not alone. God was there, listening to the prayers of His people who prayed. The RAF was fighting furiously and they were inflicting heavy losses on the Nazi fighters. However, the Nazis still had enough planes to put into the sky against Britain.
On a certain Sunday in September 1940, in the underground operations room of the 11th Group Fighter Command, PM Winston Churchill and his military advisers were facing a crisis. They knew that England needed a miracle. Here is what happened:
As Churchill watched on that momentous September Sunday, a sudden alert showed more than forty aircraft approaching from the French seaport, Dieppe; more than forty approaching from another direction; more than sixty from still another; and even more than eighty aircraft approaching in one unit. As each Nazi formation neared the English coast a British squadron would rise to meet it. Since there were only 25 squadrons assigned to the 11th Fighter Command defending southern England soon all of them were in the air.
Tension grew in the underground shelter. Air Vic-Marshall Keith R. Park requested reinforcements from Stanmore to the north, but the could spare only three squadrons.
"What other resources have we?" Churchill asked.
"None, Sir!" was the reply. The room was silent.
"The odds were great, our margin small, the stakes infinite," Churchill wrote later. Then inexplicably, the discs on the wall chart began to move eastward. The great Nazi air flotilla had turned back. With 185 of their aircraft downed in flames, they were in retreat! Miraculously, against all logistical probability, the Royal Air Force had won the battle! (p. 16)
Later some amazing intelligence was received by British intelligence officers from three different members of the Nazi armed forces who captured when their planes were downed over England. Here is what was revealed when they questioned them:
"Why did your formation retreat when only two planes were attacking you?" the intelligence officers asked the prisoner.
"Two!" exclaimed the pilot. "There were hundreds!"
After the prisoner had been dismissed, the British intelligence officers exchanged puzzled glances. They all but dismissed the strange reply until a Luftwaffe officer, captured later, asked them in perplexity.
"Where did you get all the planes you threw into the battle over Britain?" His British interrogators managed to mask their surprise.
Actually, the powerful Nazi bomber force had been met by a mere handful of little outmoded Royal Air Force Spitfire and Hurricane fighters. There was no sky full of Royal Air Force plane! Only a few dog-tired pilots...had met his mighty bombers.
Perhaps visionary planes rode the skies in formation with the Royal Air Force and perhaps only the Nazis could see those planes that convinced them they were confronted by overwhelming numbers.
It was the remarks of an imprisoned Nazi Intelligence officer captured still later that came nearest to disclosing the divine source of the plane-filled mirages which had confused the Luftwaffe pilots.
"With the striking of your Big Ben clock each evening at nine," the Nazi told the British Intelligence officers, "you used a secret weapon which we did not understand. It was very powerful and we could find no countermeasure against it..." (p. 17)
In fact, this very powerful weapon was heartfelt nation-wide prayer. Every evening as Big Ben struck nine. The whole of the British Isles and even people from around the English Commonwealth paused for a the famous Silent Moment of Prayer that was inspired and started by W. Tudor Pole. These prayers, the secret weapon, may very well have materialized into those imaginary planes that scared off the tough Nazis. We serve a living God, who is very much there and is not silent. This encourages us that when we pray for our country, God does hear our cries.
Prayer Changes things!
God Bless.
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Reference:
Katherine Pollard Carter, The Mighty Hand of God, Missouri, USA: Impact Books, Inc., 1991, pp. 15-19
