We're a couple of days past the Memorial Day weekend so I'll share a few thoughts from a book I'm reading about World War II – The Storm of War, by Andrew Roberts. It's a new history about the war, but not in the “dumbing down” or “rewriting the history of the war” sense.  It tells the story of the war in more technical terms and here's a well-known historical fact and one example from the book.

Hitler's surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, began on June 22, 1941.  His plan was to defeat Russia for two reasons:

1)    He knew that when America entered the war in Europe he would then have a two front war – the US and Great Britain in France and Russia on an eastern front.

2)    Germany needed the natural resources of Russia to sustain and win the war.

I said all this to state that as the German war planners began to look at invading Russia for her coal, oil, and grain – they estimated that (if successful in their aim to conquer Russia) 30 million Russians would likely starve to death in the first year of the invasion!  Imagine it – military strategists counting 30 million human beings as a “reasonable cost” for what the Germans hoped to gain!  We know that Operation Barbarossa didn't succeed and Hitler lost over 1 million soldiers.

At the least, history tells us how dark the dark side of human cruelty can be and how much the gospel is needed in any era.  At the most, as we look back on another Memorial Day, we realize how fortunate we are that so “many gave some and others gave all”!

Pastor Mark