Hank Smith: 00:02 Welcome to followHIM Favorites. This is where John and I are sharing a single story to go with each week’s lesson. John, we’re in the second half of the war chapters, the last 10 chapters of Alma, and I know you have a great story, because I’ve heard you tell it before. This is where Captain Moroni has written a not-so-kind letter, we’ll call it that, a not-so-kind letter to Pahoran accusing him of sitting on his throne, while all these men are out there fighting and dying. Captain Moroni ends up being a little bit off in his assumptions, but you have a perfect story for this situation.

John Bytheway: 00:39 I have four words in my margin right next to Alma 60, verse 22. You’re right. Moroni is saying, “Have you forgotten the commandments of the Lord? Have you forgotten the captivity of our fathers? Have you forgotten how many times we’ve been delivered?” In verse 20. Verse 21, “Do you think the Lord will still deliver us while we sit upon our thrones?” And then in verse 22, “Will you sit in idleness while ye are surrounded with thousands of those, tens of thousands who do also sit in idleness, while there are thousands round about in the borders of the land, who are falling by the sword, yea wounded and bleeding?” And Hank, I have four words in my margin, “Dad in the Pacific,” and it’s quite a story, so I’ll try to tell it. Hank, you have seen, and people are familiar probably with the statue of the Marines pushing up the flag at Iwo Jima during World War II.

Hank Smith: 01:29 Beautiful picture.

John Bytheway: 01:30 And the statue, if you’ve ever seen it at Arlington National Cemetery is moving. It’s huge. That was taken February 23rd, 1945, and on February 21st, 1945, my dad just turned 19 years old, was a lookout and a gunner’s mate on the USS Saratoga, which is an aircraft carrier. They were northwest of Iwo Jima. He wrote an autobiography. First paragraph: “I had taken my place on lookout watch at 1600 hours. The day was Wednesday, February 21st, 1945. I’d been on lookout watch for about an hour when our leader advised me to proceed to my battle station as bogeys were shown up on our radar screen at 80 miles. I immediately left my lookout station to send it through the superstructure and was crossing under the flight deck on the port side when I heard…” And my dad described this, “Bwong bwong bwong,” that was the general quarters alarm.

  02:27 I’ll just tell the rest. He was underneath the top is called the flight deck. Below is the hangar deck running across the hangar deck. He said, “I felt the ship jolt. Something hit us. I got up. I ran out to my gun. I looked out there and I saw this airplane coming at us and I thought, what is that guy doing? He thought it was an F-six Hellcat, one of our fighter planes.” And he said it wasn’t. As his eyes focused, he said, “That’s a zero. That’s a Zeke.” They had two names for it, “Coming right at us.”

Hank Smith: 02:58 Which is an enemy plane, right?

John Bytheway: 03:00 An enemy plane. He said, “We’re breaking open ammunition as fast as we could. Our gunner jumped up there and swung around.” He was on what they call a quad-forty, four barrels, 40 millimeter anti-aircraft. “Our gunner swung around and started to boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, fire at this plane.” Dad was called a second loader. He handed the ammunition to the first loader who held it just right and dropped it in the breach of the gun. One of these kamikazes came and hit all the Marines on a quad-forty in front of them. And my dad said, “I just thought my folks are going to get the telegram. We regret to inform you type of a thing.” And he said, “All we could do was focus on our job.” He stayed at his post, and he fought for his life and the life of his comrades, and the ship took about seven kamikazes.

  03:50 The ship was stopped. It was dead in the water. He thought, “We are a prize for a submarine”. One of the things he said that I just thought was so cool, Hank, he said, “A destroyer came up at flank speed firing every gun it had, and then stopped and pulled in front of the bow.” That is where the enemy was coming to try to hit the bow. Here’s the skipper of this destroyer saying to the enemy, “If you’re going to hit the carrier, you’re going to have to go through us.” Isn’t that amazing? The gallantry of these guys? Long story short, that battle went on for hours. Dad wasn’t a member of the church at the time, but a couple of these guys were, and he was so worried about them. Well, finally, they got the fires out. They cleared from general quarters. The ship was pretty beat up, and my dad said, “I got to go down to the fire rooms and see if my buddies are okay.”

  04:40 He got there and he said they were all okay, but they said, “Help us clean up.” This is part he did not write. This is part that he told me in person. He said that, “Some of the bodies down there were so badly burnt that we couldn’t pick them up. They would disintegrate in our hands,” and he said, “We finally had to use our shovels.” They ran out of body bags and started to have to use mattress bags. He said, “Somebody had an AM radio.” An AM radio travels really far at night, but somebody picked up Eddy Duchin and his orchestra at the Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel in San Francisco, California. And my dad said, “We heard laughing and dancing and clinking champagne glasses while I was cleaning up the bodies of my comrades.” He got emotional all over again when I interviewed him, and he said, “Did they know what we were going through out here?”

  05:38 When I read Moroni writing this to Pahoran, I know that Moroni got some of the facts wrong, and where Pahoran was in his heart. Maybe a little bit, I can start to understand how he was feeling. Did they know what we’re going through out here? My dad, he said that, “I thought, well, maybe I’m doing this so that they can be back there dancing.” And he said, “I thought that was a pretty mature thought for a nineteen-year-old.” I think so too. 123 killed, 196 wounded, and he talked about the memorial service. The chaplains would say a prayer over these bodies in a body bag or a mattress bag. They put a spent five-inch shell in there. I have pictures of this, and they would say a prayer over them, the chaplains, and then bury them at sea. And he said, “I thought about all those letters going home to those moms and dads.”

  06:34 But he said one of them was a tall redheaded LDS boy from Provo. Here’s why I think he knew that. At one o’clock on Sundays, there would be an announcement, our LDS church service is in the library, and these buddies of my dad, Keith Crawford, Cal Miller, grabbed my dad and said, “You’re coming with us.” And he said, “I didn’t want to go. Sometimes they pulled me off my bunk, often cruelly.” I think of the story in Luke 5, men brought in a bed, a man who was taken with the palsy. “You’re coming with us. We’re taking you to Christ.” And that is exactly what these teenage boys did for my dad. He got home from the war, thought, “You know, I should date some LDS girls.” One of those was a girl named Diane. One day he asked her, “Hey, could you ask your dad to baptize me?”

  07:28 And she said, “Okay.” Vernon Jarman baptized my dad, and then later, “Hey, Diane, would you marry me?” She said, “Okay.” And then he got called on a mission to New England after they were married. Korean War, a shortage of elders.

Hank Smith: 07:45 Wow.

John Bytheway: 07:45 I know. Cool story, huh? Went on a mission, hung out in the mission home with Truman Madsen, who had been on a mission there and used to come back and hang out at the mission home. So when I saw him at BYU, he would always say, “Hello Jack, hello Jack.” Got home from his mission, they had six children. I’m number five. That’s what I think of when I see Alma 60:22, was dad in the Pacific. And I have to add, my brother Kendrick opened his mission call to Sapporo, Japan, and nobody could have been happier than my Dad.

Hank Smith: 08:20 Wow.

John Bytheway: 08:22 To say, Kendrick, you’re going back there for a completely different reason than I did. Because human nature divides us, divine nature unites us. These war chapters can teach us some lessons about applying the gospel in the toughest times, but ultimately, the Savior comes, the Prince of Peace comes. Pretty cool that Kendrick could go to Japan, and my dad could be so thrilled about that. So when I had a hard day on my mission, Hank, all I had to remember was, yeah, dad had a hard time too, but he stayed at his post and he fought for his life, helped me try to do the same thing.

Hank Smith: 08:58 And I think of all the ways I could apply that story, do they know what we’re going through? That could be almost anything. What about the apostles and prophets? Do we try to remember all that the work they’re doing on our behalf? Or our parents? If I’m away at college, do you remember all that your parents are doing for you while you are enjoying yourself? It’s just a wonderful principle to remember those who could be suffering in anywhere in the world while you are sitting upon your throne.

John Bytheway: 09:28 Hank, thanks for saying that because Dad didn’t say, “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be doing this.” He knew he was where he was supposed to be. It was just, “Do you know? Do you have empathy for what we’re doing, and do you appreciate it?” Whenever I’m in an audience and I see veterans or I see a guy in the airport that says, “Veteran,” I like to say, “Hey, thank you for your service.”

Hank Smith: 09:47 I see it. I see it.

John Bytheway: 09:48 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 09:50 Well, thank you for letting us into the world of John Glenn Bytheway, that was really fun. We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast. It’s called followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. We’re with Dr. Justin Top this week. He’s been in war himself. It’s interesting how he walks us through these chapters, and then come back here next week, we’ll do another followHIM Favorites.