Chapter 15: Battlefront

Squabbles over polygamy are soon overshadowed by the political controversies enveloping the country. The enforcement of obscure, outdated, and conflicting marriage laws in rural towns takes a back seat as officials at all levels of government recognize that the very existence of the nation is at stake. Alarmed at the atrocities committed by Japanese nationalistic forces in their rape of Nanking, Heber J. Grant fears a similar fate for Germany’s enemies. He leaves his comfortable headquarters in Salt Lake and embarks on a tour of Germany to ascertain the gravity of the gathering gale.

Although America’s allies are not yet at war with Germany, Franco’s fascist forces are testing Hitler’s weaponry, and President Grant needs no prophetic vision to foresee the coming conflagration. Upon his return, he orchestrates an all-out evacuation, promptly sending Joseph Fielding Smith to Germany to summon the remaining missionaries home. After wandering through the train stations – and famously whistling Do what is Right in an attempt to inconspicuously spot fellow missionaries – the designated pipers lead the last of the elders, including the likes of Joseph B. Wirthlin and other notable figures, back to the Hamburg docks to board U.S.-bound ships.

Members of the Class of 1928 are just old enough to avoid being sent to the front lines as cannon fodder in the event of a draft, but Hamp volunteers for military service long before it comes to conscription. His time with Grand Canyon Airlines has certainly fueled his obsession with flying, but the scheduled flight plans and set itineraries feel increasingly confining. His decision to enlist in the Army Air Corps is initially motivated not so much by a desire to defend his country but rather by his wish to take advantage of the opportunity to pilot much more novel flying machines than the Park Service could ever muster.

With the new-found freedom of a military pilot, Hamp craves every chance to get off the ground. He recognizes immediately that the dated aircraft now at his disposal in the Air Corps – though an improvement over the Park Service fleet – are by no means a match for the sleek machines he had seen rolling off the German assembly lines several years before. No viable air corps can exist in the United States until the pilots have been sufficiently trained, and pilots cannot be adequately trained without suitable training craft; that bottleneck is obvious to the top brass and the flyboys alike. Hamp is therefore asked to focus his efforts on putting the training craft to the test, improving their design at every turn.

During his solo flights, Hamp often wishes his father could occupy the empty copilot’s seat; Chick had been enthralled with the pilots and explorers he had hosted during his civic club duties, and he certainly would have enjoyed joining Hamp on these flights. Even when he is on the ground, Hamp continually watches the skies for the optimal conditions: billowing clouds that look like mountains, icescapes, or massive buildings in an aerial city. On these days, he comes up with any excuse he can muster to take to the air and dart in and out of the cloud formations, imagining himself to be on another planet. In fact, as he dodges the clouds, he feels that he is quite literally connecting with his father. In his opinion, the heavens couldn’t be more beautiful if he could hie to Kolob itself. This addiction is in his blood; he had inherited it from his father, and it would – a generation later – extend to his yet unborn son: the future captain of the Eagle Mountain Air Force.

At times, the training craft fail to withstand the contortions they are put through. Several of them, in fact, give out with Hamp at the controls. His logbook records simply, bailed out, with no other explanation. After parachuting to safety, a quick description of the problem is handed to the engineers, who promptly fix the flaws in the other grounded aircraft until the identified problems are all remedied. Cleaning up the wreckage is left to someone else, and Hamp returns to the air as soon as his report is filed and the aircraft are deemed airworthy again. He finds a surreal feeling of peace and perspective high above the clouds, yet even in the adrenaline-filled moments when an aircraft begins another nosedive or tailspin, he realizes that he does not fear one bit for his life; in some ways, in fact, he realizes that he would almost welcome the chance to join his father and be granted a glimpse of the universe’s mysteries.

A medical condition that he had contracted one winter in Silesia – which he blames on having walked barefoot on the cold, concrete floors – eventually catches up with him during a routine medical examination. His dreams of piloting bombers or other warbirds come to an end with a single, red stamp by the physician. As disappointed as he is at the time to be washing out of the Air Corps, given the grim survival statistics for bomber pilots in the coming conflict, this stamp – quite possibly – saves his life.

He resorts to designing airplanes for McDonnell Aircraft Corporation. It is a company of just 15 employees at the outbreak of war in Europe, but Pearl Harbor’s Day of Infamy and the ensuing declaration of war flood McDonnell with military contracts that swell their ranks to over 5,000 staff. While this buildup provides some promising career opportunities for Hamp, he realizes that his previous experience will now be even more valuable to the military.

While he doesn’t necessarily stem from a military family, Mimi had often told him the stories of her own grandfather, Jonathan Hampton, whose brothers had donned a military uniform and marched off in the Mormon Battalion, leaving their families even after learning of Jonathan’s death in Nauvoo as a result of the mob’s persecution.

Hamp feels an inherited tug of patriotism and decides to answer the call of duty; when the Air Corps is reorganized as the U.S. Army Air Forces, he reenlists and ships out to the Territory of Hawaii to direct air traffic at Hickam Field. Marjorie, with a newborn son at home, feels abandoned and alone, but Hamp tries to reassure her that Hawaii is far enough from the frontlines to guarantee his safe return.

All around the world, American soldiers are engaged in iconic fights, from the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Bulge, to Midway, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal; meanwhile, Hamp remains removed from the conflict and his former classmates sit it out in a homeland support role: Rulon applies his accounting skills to farm management in Idaho, Gordon works in the planning center of a rail yard in Colorado, and Homer teaches university political science courses in Utah.

Though fate had certainly been on their side in sparing them all from the elements of front-line fighting, Hamp still finds himself at times envying his stateside friends. As Christmas approaches in 1942, he is the only one of the foursome without his wife at his side; his one-year old son is an ocean away, and the loneliness pierces him. Given the unfolding calamity on the line of scrimmage, however, he is just as lucky as his other classmates to have escaped the worst horrors of the war.

Just a few excess years in age had convinced the military planners to use them for their brains rather than for their brawn. Marginally past their physical prime, they each have to admit that their gradually growing waistlines and the onset of other physical limitations might actually hinder the infantry in the heat of battle; as they read the newspaper headlines of the mounting casualties, though, they feel like outsiders – humbled and helpless at the same time. As lucky as they feel to have avoided the draft age, survivor’s guilt also affects them.

Adding to this guilt is the knowledge that neither fame, nor fortune, nor age can ultimately prevent someone with enough willpower from joining the fight first-hand; as the Allied troops put the white cliffs of Dover to their backs and launch their assault on the sandy slopes of Normandy, for example, Teddy Roosevelt, Jr. – approaching sixty years old – by his own insistence storms Utah Beach at H-Hour with a cane and a pistol, trying to match the feats of his rough-rider father.

Ernest Hemingway tries to join in on the D-Day action as well, but his superiors lock their “precious cargo” inside his own landing craft until the machine gun fire subsides. At the same time his protégé, Jerome David “J. D.” Salinger, joins unprotected and undiscovered actors like Sir Alec “Obi-Wan” Guinness and James “Scotty” Doohan in storming the beach on that longest of days. Amidst a hailstorm of bullets and shells, they somehow manage to dodge the fire, living to see another day. As German machine guns indiscriminately mow down their brothers-in-arms, they surely can’t imagine what other talents and immeasurable influences are being quashed in the sands. As they march forward, fearful but undeterred, fatal bullets to their right and to their left stifle untold future dreams and aspirations that are ultimately whisked out to sea with the waning tide.

On the other side of the world, neither fame nor unmatched talent prevents Louis Zamperini, America’s best hope for a gold medal in the now-defunct Tokyo Olympics, from joining the offensive line. Having been personally congratulated by Adolf Hitler himself for a spectacular performance in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, Louis now uses the endurance he gained as a distance runner to survive unimaginable trials in the South Pacific. After surviving a plane crash, shark attacks, strafing, and near-starvation, he is finally rescued…but unfortunately by the enemy. By this time, the war is almost won, but Louis now begins a new set of trials that includes beatings, forced labor, and medical tests as a human guinea pig.

Had Uncle Sam not retracted his original call to arms, Hamp knows that he might have been on the same, doomed plane as Louis. Meanwhile, though, Hamp sits safely in a control tower of a tropical paradise, far from the conflict; his other classmates likewise have no immediate fear for their lives while they try their best to aid the operations through their indirect support roles.

Hamp’s wartime photos show the beaches of Hawaii; Gordon’s show the sights of Denver; Rulon’s are of rural Idaho; and Homer’s have a college campus as a backdrop. These four classmates didn’t storm the beach at Normandy or raise the flag on Iwo Jima; they served their country by pushing tin, pulling rail yard switches, balancing ledger books, and lecturing political science students. There are no accolades for this service, but the war effort still requires these seemingly trivial cogs in a less visible but equally valuable part of its machine.

When Louis is finally liberated from a deplorable POW camp near the war’s end, he opens his rations and can rest assured that the packs of dried potatoes that nourish his famished frame will continue to arrive, having been grown on an Idaho farm that owes its efficiency to Rulon’s financial wizardry; shipped to the seaport on stateside trains that keep rolling effectively through the switches thanks to Gordon’s careful logistical planning; sent airborne by Hamp’s voice over the pilots’ headsets; and delivered by military planners who appreciate the political implications of a conquest thanks to their completion of Homer’s courses.

No doubt Hamp and his former classmates each would have fought from front-line foxholes had they been called upon to do so; in the end, though, old Uncle Sam just wanted each to do his part behind the scenes.

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As victory appears more and more inevitable, local jurisdictional authorities across the United States begin to process a backlog of derelict duties that includes the enforcement of long-forgotten marriage laws. Caught in the ensuing roundup, Rulon is shocked to find himself facing charges that ultimately result in his imprisonment and separation from his family. From his prison cell, he reads the newspaper headlines as well as the daily list of local casualties that is included in each paper. Despite the tide of the war having turned in the Allies’ favor, the battles rage on, and the individual toll remains shockingly personal.

Rulon reads in the paper one day that the plane of Hugh Brown, Jr., an airman stationed in England, has gone down over the English Channel. He had come to know Hugh Jr. – Zola’s kid brother – quite well and had grown quite fond of him while they were courting; even without the prison walls, Rulon would have been uninvited to the funeral, though, so he can offer only his sincere prayers for the family. Back in Salt Lake, Brother Brown is utterly conflicted over the loss; himself the highest ranking Mormon in the British Army during World War I, he knows that his war stories had likely instilled the bravado in his namesake that had initially motivated him to volunteer in the first place – and ultimately ended his life. Despite this guilt, he remains fiercely proud of his son’s ultimate sacrifice and knows that he would have done the same himself.

The image of Sister Brown greeting a pair of military messengers at the doorstep – only to be left in a heap on the ground – had been repeated a thousand times a day across the U.S. at the height of the war; half a million U.S. families now find themselves inconsolably incomplete. The immediate families of the four former classmates pass relatively unscathed through the conflict, but everyone has close ties to those mourning a loss. Rulon lets each death notice stir him up to further resentment. Though being jailed for his beliefs makes him feel like the prophets Daniel, Paul, and Joseph Smith all wrapped into one, he is angered at this apparent waste of his nation’s precious human resources.

Why, Rulon wonders, would the authorities let an able-bodied man with a brilliant mind rot away in prison while freedom is still under threat? Serves them right, he sneers upon learning of the financial glitches that hiccup through the farming cooperatives when his replacement tries to learn the ropes without any training at all. He questions what Utah’s political leaders are doing with the Constitution and wonders who might have been behind the sheriff’s warrant. He suspects that Heber J. Grant had tipped off the authorities, fulfilling his vow and executing orders from his deathbed just to get even with him for their previous altercations. Or might it have been his nemesis, Elder Widtsoe, or perhaps his estranged ex-father-in-law, Brother Brown?

Despite his building anger and resentment, in some ways Rulon actually welcomes this time to think his plan for the future through to the end; fully aware that some of the greatest – and the most notorious – ideas in human history have been conceived from a prison cell, he immediately applies himself toward setting, documenting, and refining his long-term goals. With no compulsory agenda or daily itinerary to divert his attention, his incarceration finally gives Rulon time to get the detailed doctrinal discourses that had been circulating in his mind onto paper.

After lengthy speeches and debates at the Utah State Capitol concerning the fundamentalists’ fate, Rulon is finally released from jail. In the meantime, he has accumulated an arsenal of motivational speeches of his own – speeches that will one day be canonized as scripture by his followers.

V-E Day is soon followed by V-J Day, and Rulon is surprised and even a bit disappointed to see the newsreels of Yamamoto signing away an unconditional surrender on behalf of his nation. As patriotic as he is, Rulon had been expecting the calamities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to continue escalating into a firestorm that would mark the end of days. He had found direct references to the global conflict in his studies of John’s Revelation, and he had fully been expecting the hostility to erupt into a rapture that would land him in a prominent, governing position in the prophesied, Millennial government. Instead, the new peacetime period actually throws him off his mark a bit, and he struggles to find alternative content for his the sermons.

With his newfangled freedom, Rulon spends his weekends traveling to isolated polygamous enclaves but focuses his workday business dealings around the population center of the Salt Lake Valley. Hamp, Homer, and Gordon also return to Salt Lake City in turn to seek jobs in the post-war economy; with the ever-present enemy threat removed, however, it becomes surprisingly challenging for each of them and for the nation as a whole to return to a focus on the simple matters of day-to-day life.

The celebratory atmosphere in the U.S. begins to wane after the ticker-tape parades end, but the government and the press prolong the victory celebration with billboards, stamps, and magazine covers of the Iwo Jima flag raising and sailors stealing kisses in Times Square. The iconic images, however, cannot mask the reality of the war’s cost; in the aftermath, American widows and fatherless children mourn just the same as their counterparts on the opposite sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific – albeit in strikingly different surroundings. While confetti is cleared from American avenues, the streets of Germany, Japan, and England are constrastingly full of corpses. Over ten million Johnnies have come marching home again to a hearty welcome and shouts of hurrah in the U.S., but a much greater number of foreign soldiers have been left lying on the battlefield.

Every former European missionary knows many people overseas who have been directly and permanently affected by the war. In London alone, over a million houses lie in ruins; long after the fighting stops, many city streets are large swaths of rubble that still entomb thousands.

The flotsam carried by the wake of the sunken Nazi vessel sends repercussions around the world. Devastating holocaust images are broadcast as an aftershock, securing Nazi Germany’s humiliating position as the quintessential embodiment of evil.

As the ghastly newsreels are presented publically, confirming the vast scale of the destruction and the depraved nature of the atrocities, Hamp pulls out his mission albums – now haunting reminders of what used to be – and wonders what has become of the people and places he once knew. He looks through his old photos of Gleiwitz, Leobschütz, and other Silesian towns. Silesia’s identity has been consumed in the conflagration, and the personal toll – while yet unknown to Hamp – is staggeringly ubiquitous. What, for instance, has happened to sweet Sister Ewig, to his best German pal Herbie, and to the old Hausfrau who used to collect his rent? What has become of the local Breslau baker, the shop owner, the butcher, or the old lady who gave him the accordion? And what of the children who had played in front of the Leobschütz synagogue as he passed by?

While some stories would be buried in the debris, forever to be forgotten, he eventually learns of enough personal examples to paint a shockingly bleak picture of the cataclysmic chain of events. The two girls in Leobschütz, for example, Stefanie Zweig and Dietlinda Geissinger, truly had their world turned upside down. Both young girls had ultimately left their childhood home in a flight for their lives: Steffie from the German troops before the war broke out, and Dieta from the Russians during the war’s final volleys.

Steffie and her family waited out the war in Africa; she eventually became a writer and journalist, turning her hair-raising flight to Kenya into an Oscar-winning production. In her post-war reporting, she conducts newspaper interviews with countless survivors of the war, among them Otto Frank – Anne’s father – and others affected by the holocaust.

Dieta’s fate took her in another direction. With the Russian troops on her heels, she had ridden her family’s sturdy Bulldog tractor as far from town as it would take her – then ditched the tractor for her creaky bike, which she rode all the way across Czechoslovakia, finally settling on the Bavarian farm that later became our family home in the 1970’s. The Leobschütz that my adopted Grandma Geissinger knew would only continue living in the memories she shared with us around the large hearth in her family Stube.

The heartwarming stories of her youth lie in stark contrast to the dismal, post-war scene that Hamp reads about, in which the burned-out buildings of the Leobschütz lie in the same pile of rubble as the synagogue that had been smashed by its own residents just a few years before. Even in these tiny villages, countless examples prove the biblical notion that violence begets violence.

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Silesia and the former East Prussian island are both severed from the now defunct German Reich, and Church membership in the previously thriving congregations of Danzig, Breslau, Königsberg, and Stettin is decimated. Even the Mormon fortress of Selbongen in East Prussia – where Elder Widtsoe had dedicated the first meetinghouse of the Church in continental Europe – only briefly manages to sputter along. Where an active branch of several hundred – more than half of its villagers – had formerly flourished, only a few holdouts try in vain to keep the flame alive.

While the German Saints dig themselves out of the rubble and are joined by a flood of refugees arriving from the east, Herbert Schreiter wanders through the carnage of Leipzig’s train station. His own hometown lies in ruins along with the rest of the bewildered nation. He has been called as a traveling missionary to salvage what remains of the German branches of the Church; but what is left to salvage? The people do not want to hear about the gospel; they are more interested in food, shelter, and other bare necessities.

Herbie stares at the pockmarked bullet scars in the massive stonework of the great station’s walls and wonders how it could have come to this. Though his own wife and children are themselves very nearly starving, Herbie bids them farewell and – not unlike the earliest Latter-day Saints who left their sick and dying families in the malaria-ridden swamps of Nauvoo to embark on their missions – boards a train to the rural town of Bernburg to begin picking up the war-torn pieces of the Church.

As he arrives in Bernburg he is disheartened by the scene the instant he steps off the platform. He walks along the town’s main street and, seeing nothing but sorrow around him, sits down on a crippled wagon to eat a piece of bread. As he surveys the miserable conditions present in every angle of the sweeping panorama before him, he is absolutely overwhelmed. Wondering where to start, he thinks back to his first mission over a decade before. Thanks to Hamp, if there is one thing that he had learned on that mission, it is tracting – not the sort that involves knocking on doors but rather the art of distributing tracts…printed tracts. He takes a crumpled sheet of butcher paper out of his pocket and begins to lay out the design for a poster.

With his draft flyer in hand, he begins to wander through the town, asking the passersby where he might find a print shop. Unfortunately, none are operable, but he finally manages to find a store with a working mimeograph machine that had not been cannibalized for spare parts. Paper is equally difficult to secure, since most wood products have long since been burned for heat or fuel. Though he has to dip into his dwindling coin purse, he acquires from the shopkeeper a stack of blank paper. Finally, gambling his investment on this treasure, he cranks out a hundred copies with the question in block letters, “Will man live again?” He feels sure that the message on his flyer will resonate with the shell-shocked people, some of whom have lost loved ones or, indeed, may be facing the prospect of slipping out of mortality at that very moment. He includes the address of the bombed-out chapel and hopes that his efforts might attract some visitors to help the tiny branch rebuild.

The people on the streets refuse to take his flyers, however. “Don’t give us paper,” they cry, “we need bread!”

Ultimately foiled in his efforts, Herbie finally pastes his remaining flyers to the remnant brick walls and sign posts left standing around town. It has all seemed a fruitless effort, so he makes his way back to the train station to try his luck in another town.

Herbie continues his ministry among the meek members and “poor in spirit” who gather at the skeletal chapels scattered all across eastern Germany, helping them to rebuild their lives and their congregations as best he can. During the years that he spends in the capacity of a traveling missionary, he passes through the hub of Hauptbahnhof Leipzig again and again. The damaged tracks are gradually repaired, and the busy station eventually begins to bustle again. The very cattle cars that had brought so many to their doom in the infamous KZ camps now bring endless streams of troops back from the front – the western front, that is; the forgotten eastern front has swallowed their counterparts whole and is not about to spit them back into society. Stalin continues inflicting his revenge on the Germans by operating his POW camps long after the supposed peace is declared. In the eastern German states, there is no return to peace and prosperity; one monster has simply been devoured by another.

Only a few – including several of Hamp and Herbie’s former companions – ever return from Siberian captivity. As the years pass, one surviving spouse after another gradually gives up hope for the return of her beloved companion and takes on the dreaded status of becoming a war widow. A generation of Germans that had already included over a million war widows from the so-called War to End all Wars had somehow failed to convince the next generation to avoid the same fate; rather than prompting a refusal to fight again, revenge for the purported injustice of the armistice has now packed several million additional war widows into a country not much larger in size than the U.S. state of Nevada.

With the newly arrived apostle Ezra Taft Benson coordinating the efforts on the ground in Europe, aid packages from Utah and Idaho begin to arrive for the Saints to combat the post-war famine. These Büchsen temporarily stave off the hunger of the Saints and attract a number of other needy souls – dubbed Büchsen Mormonen – to the Church. Some merely seek to quench a physical hunger; others are looking for more of a spiritual sustenance and join the local branches. All take part in the reconstruction, sifting through the ashes and rubble to pick up the pieces and put their lives, their communities, and their branches back together.

Although the onset of the U.S. baby boom is immediate, the innumerable voids left by loss cannot be filled so quickly anywhere on the planet. As Europe’s bomb craters are filled by surviving, shovel-wielding widows and orphans, the onset of the European baby boom is delayed. Eventually, though – thanks to the Marshall Plan and other visionary reconstruction policies – former tank factories begin to crank our Porsches and Toyotas, and eventually life manages to return to some semblance of normalcy the world over.