Let Go and Let God

True Story

Jane Arnold sent five sons to war and prayed them all back home, safe again. Although two of her sons were still awaiting transportation from the European Theater of Operations, the family gatherings for Sunday dinner were again noisy, joyous affairs that filled her home. Eleven children, together with spouses and grandchildren stretched the seams of their modest dining room.

The Arnold Family

On one such Sunday in November, 1945, the dishes were cleared, washed and stacked away. Everyone agreed that it was Jane’s best roast and potatoes ever tasting of the love with which she cooked. Her husband Harry was dozing in the living room, and all but one son, Charles, had headed home. Charles’ wife went ahead because, somehow, she knew that he needed time with his mother.

Jane Arnold

Jane well understood that war caused people to do things that they wouldn’t in normal times, but she also knew that her son, all her sons, would carry them as guilt. It was best for them to confess.

One slice of pie remained in the pan on the table, and Jane pushed it towards her son but he held up his hands. “No, thank you, mom. You’ll have to be patient. You can’t put all that weight back on me in just one meal,” he added with a laugh.

Jane put on her worried look and tugged at the shoulder of his sports coat trying to get it to lie better on his emaciated frame. With a sigh she pulled the pie away and settled back to listen, to be his confessor.

As they spoke in hushed tones, Charles admitted the mayhem he had wreaked on the enemy. Charles had been a naval aviator, flying Wildcat warplanes based on an escort carrier, USS Hoggatt Bay, in the Pacific Theater. He had returned from every one of his 25 missions having expended every one of the 500 rounds loaded into each of the four .50 caliber machine guns mounted in his wings. Even more heinous were the missions during which he had dropped bombs filled with napalm, jellied gasoline, to immolate men and materials as well as enemy facilities.

---

Lt Charles Arnold USNR

“Yes, it wasn’t a real sin,” he admitted, “but it feels like it.”

“And the fear,” Jane prompted.

“I’m more ashamed of the fear than anything I did.”

“Only a fool doesn’t know fear.”

Charles accepted his mother’s wisdom without comment.

“I saw  it once, your fear,” she announced and an unspoken question passed between them.

Jane responded by rising and walking into the kitchen where her desk occupied a nook near the stove. It was the command center from which she organized her home.

Keeping house and a family was Jane’s purpose in life, practiced since the age of eight when she accompanied her father from Wales to America in 1893. She cooked and kept house for him for three years in a cabin on the wilderness prairie that would become North Dakota a few years later. Her only companions were the scant remaining herds of bison that grazed there, the buffalo wolves that preyed upon them, and the fear. Worst were the nights when the weather kept her father from home and the wolves sniffed and pawed at the door. Yes, she well-understood fear and yet, her faith allowed these experiences to wash over her without marring the humor of her smile nor dimming the twinkle in her eyes.

Jane returned carrying her calendar to the dining table where Charles waited. Flipping the pages she searched among the phone numbers, recipes, shopping lists, and important dates until she found a note she had made on the space reserved for Thursday, June 14, 1945. Her eyes lingered on the date for several moments before she rested a finger tip on it.

Charles’ eyes followed the gesture and widened as he interpreted the cryptic note. “Charles in danger. Plane on fire.”

“How could…” he began to ask.

“I saw it as I was getting dinner on the table.”

Charles waited patiently as his mother retrieved the memory.

“I saw you as a small boy flying an airplane,” she began. “How strange, I thought. Why is a small boy flying an airplane?”

She paused. Charles opened his mouth to ask something, but his mother continued before he could.

“Then I saw the smoke. You were terrified, a little boy terrified, trying to escape the plane.”

Another pause. Finding nothing else of the memory, she looked at him and added the words he expected.

“I stopped and prayed. I prayed to the Lord to keep you safe, and then finished putting dinner on the table and called your father. I told him what I saw. He said grace and then asked for the Lord’s protection too.”

Mother and son sat quietly for several minutes when she was done. Charles looked perplexed.

“It happened,” he said at last. “My plane caught fire and I was afraid. It caught fire after I strafed a Japanese camp on a small island. But it was on a Friday in June, I’m pretty sure, not a Thursday.”

“What did you do?”

“I was going to bail out. No pilot wants to be caught in a cockpit fire.”

Jane placed her hand on her son’s and could feel it trembling. “Good,” she thought to herself. “He’s letting go of the fear. Please God,” she prayed to herself, “let me carry it for him.”

“But you didn’t?” she asked aloud.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was afraid.”

Now Jane could see the fear she felt in her son.

“We were told that the water temperature was only forty-seven degrees and rescue couldn’t reach me before I’d die of hypothermia. The fleet was over fifty miles away, out of radar range, and they wouldn’t know my exact position.”

The trembling in her son’s hand grew as the memory of two equally fatal choices took hold.

“I was half out of the cockpit with one hand on the stick trying to decide when…”

“When?”

“When the fire stopped.”

“It just stopped?”

“Yes.”

Jane smiled and murmured, “Praise God.”

The trembling slowly subsided.

“I was still in trouble,” Charles continued. “The fire was in the fuse box and I had lost all my electrical systems. Navigation. Heat, Radio. Guns. Lights. Everything.”

“You were able to fly back to the carrier?”

“Yes. One of my buddies led me.”

Wildcat circling to land on USS Hoggatt Bay (CVE 75)

“And you landed safely?”

“Of course,” Charles responded with a chuckle. “I’m here. I cranked down the landing gear and waited until my buddies flew around me to make sure everything was okay, and the carrier gave me permission to land. I had to hang onto the wing after I reached the deck. My legs wouldn’t hold me up. The crew chief opened the fuse box and found a flattened piece of shrapnel that had caused the fire.”

“This happened on a Friday?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure.”

Jane shrugged off the inconsistency as of no consequence.

They parted soon after Charles had regained his composure, him to his home a few houses away where his wife waited, and she to her living room to sit and enjoy the company of her husband.

Charles phoned just before Jane was about to wake her husband and lead him to bed.
“Mom? I checked my diary. It was a Friday. Friday, June 15. But it was the same day.”

The discrepancy confused Jane until her son explained. “The incident. The one we were talking about. You have it on your calendar as June 14. I have it in my diary for June 15.”

“They’re not the same.”

“But they are,” Charles persisted. “We were on the other side of the International Date Line.”