Remembering One ‘Private First Class’ And The Weapons Of War Provided Through God’s Word And Prayer For God’s People
My wife and I went to visit and honor my Dad at his marker in the cemetery today. He passed 19 years ago and he and his fellow deceased veterans were remembered for Memorial Day with special flags and touchstones to commemorate their service to our country.
Stanley J. Szymanski, first American born son (1918) to his Polish immigrant family, enlisted after the events of Pearl Harbor. He trained at Fort Dix. Stan went to Mexico with his new Army buddies on leave and got his first hangover and dysentery all at the same time.
My father literally fought his way (with the help of the U.S. Army) across the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. This personal campaign included stops in the Philippines, New Guinea, Luzon and Leyte, just to name a few places in his tropical engagements.
My dad and his company saw a lot of action and he carried most of those experiences quietly with him during the rest of his 84 years to his final rest.
Dad made note of one South Pacific engagement in particular. His company had been sent to a small island to engage the Japanese and they took up position a few miles from those of the land or the rising sun.
The men had to ford a stream that was approximately chest high so they formed a chain to safely cross the water. The water was rapid; the string of men broke and my father was sent hurtling downstream.
As he was thrown violently to and fro by the whitewater, he jettisoned his pack, then his rifle and belt. He finally was able to halt his horrendous ride and get onshore a few miles down river. As he crawled ashore, artillery started to fall just above his location. He looked across the tributary and saw a number of the men in his platoon waving frantically for him to run to them. My father had beached himself literally underneath a Japanese position. When the chain had broken in the river, one of the men ran back to their base, told the leadership what had happened and they called in an artillery strike so that the men would have a chance to retrieve Stan.
If not for God’s hand and an accurate artillery barrage, I really do not think that I would be here to write this as the chances of my father making it out of that situation and eventually starting a family would be slim.
Later in the operation in the Pacific and specifically after the battle in Leyete in 1945, P.F.C. Szymanski had a chance to go home on leave for a few weeks. But it depended on he and another soldier drawing lots for a seat on the ship. After drawing his lot, he said that he felt that his luck was so bad that he just turned and left to take a leak in the bamboo. To his shock the commander came to find him to tell him that he was the winner and that he would get a few weeks home on leave.
While he was on the ship in the Gulf of Leyte waiting to cast off, the U.S. dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan which meant that Stanley J. Szymanski was going home for good.
The U.S. Servicemen and women who fought not only in WW2 but in all wars since then did not necessarily have good luck or bad luck. What they shared in common was a love of country and a fierce commitment to those whom they fought with to protect the lives of their friends and to accomplish their mission.
The fact that despite all of the impending totalitarianism that has been foisted on the American people as of late (and with more in store), we can make up our mind to walk and act as a free people and to fight fiercely for our family and friends to keep, restore and maintain the freedom that the forefathers of this country envisioned for us.
This commitment is what motivated men like my father to enlist to not figuratively but actually to fight for America’s freedom when we were attacked. Today, America is being attracted from all sides in a very different type of warfare. Impending famine and attack in our food supply–oil, gasoline and diesel prices that have all doubled–sky high home prices and rent–lethal untested injections that have killed tens of thousands and injured more than a million people and despots who try to pass legislation take away our rights. This war against America is designed to take our God-given rights and to extinguish us as a free people.
The next time you are at a cemetery and see the grave of a veteran ask yourself if you can muster the same gumption that they did to fight the fight for the freedom and survival of a nation by resisting tyranny where we might once again have freedom, life and liberty for all.
My father was not a Godly man in any way until the very end of his life, but he prayed -many times- while he was in the midst of battle; especially hand to hand combat. Dad did not carry the standard knife issued by the Army. His father was college educated in Krakow but during the depression used his skills as a blacksmith to work in the mills in Pittsburgh in order to pay the bills. He made my father a knife that Dad would carry throughout his entire time in the Pacific theatre. It was perfectly balanced and could cut a limb off of a tree that was as thick as your wrist with one swing.
In the attack that is now put upon America, we all need weapons with which to strike the enemy that is offered to us by our Heavenly Father-prayer and God’s Word. If you are not a Godly person and are not praying for help to fight and for God’s provision it is because you are not in the fight; you are most likely asleep.
Your enemies are upon you. Sometimes you are in water that is chest high. Sometimes you are cast into the midst of an enemy position. Sometimes you are engaged in the one of the most epic battles of the war (in my Dad’s case, Leyte). Although I could share many scriptures with you on this subject, today I share Psalm 3 with you that you, through the power of God, may take the fight to the enemy:
1 Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! many are they that rise up against me.
2 Many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God. Selah.
3 But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.
4 I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. Selah.
5 I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.
6 I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about.
7 Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.
8 Salvation belongeth unto the Lord: thy blessing is upon thy people. Selah. (Psalm 3, KJV)
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Stan Szymanski (or Encouraging Angels) is not a medical doctor. This is not medical advice. In all matters pertaining to the health and care of a human being consult a medical doctor. This is not legal, financial or personal advice. Consult appropriate professionals in those fields for that type of advice.
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Thanks, Stan!
From another first-born son of Polish immigrants who worked the steel mills of Pittsburg, Youngstown, and Cleveland–we share the same stories and have the same faith.
My Dad, another “ski,” was an Army artilleryman post D-Day. A gentle giant, but once roused was your worst enemy. He got into a few scrapes with the NAZIs and his eyes always teared up when talking about the guys in his unit that didn’t make it back.
None of this police, lawyers, or dispute resolution stuff; things got handled “out back.” He boxed and made a few bucks to support the family during the Depression. He feared neither man nor beast.
He also found Jesus late in life and to this day I am still amazed at the number of guys from his unit that came to his funeral to pay their respects to him from all points of the compass.
Would that his generation were still around, We’ll just have to carry the torch for them!
Very moving, Stan! What a GREAT MAN !!
Who knows… maybe my Father and yours crossed paths.
My Mother and Father were married in 1938. My Father had come from a broken home and was essentially an orphan. He worked his way into owning a gas station in Minnesota, but was one of the first men drafted because he was from another county in Minnesota. The politically correct thing to do at the time, draft those that are not your own. He was forced to almost give away the gas station and was bitter about what he had worked so hard for. But he went.
He was assigned to the Army’s 81st Wildcat Division, composed mostly of Southerners, which would end up fighting the Japanese in the Pacific on Guadalcanal, New Guinea and the Palau Islands. He told me stories of climbing down the side of troop ship cargo nets into landing craft and landing on the beaches. The men who fell off the nets sunk and drowned with the heavy gear they carried. No attempt was even made to save them. There were rats as big as small dogs on those islands from feasting on the dead bodies and they used to come into the fox holes and attack my dad and the other soldiers.
On the Palau Islands, my Dad was lined up to take his turn swinging on a rope past the front of cave openings the Japanese were holed up in and throw in blocks of TNT until they had killed all the Japanese who were fighting to the death. All men in line to where my Dad stood in line had been killed or wounded. Then a soldier in the line in front of him had his arm blown off from the TNT block lit just before his jump and ‘swing’ in front of the cave opening.
The guy who lost his arm was considered lucky because he was alive and going home with the ‘million dollar wound.’ My Dad was third in line behind this guy to go and ears ringing from the explosion that also killed the man lighting the TNT blocks. And then out of no where a Division Headquarters sergeant pulled up in a jeep and walked the line calling my Dad’s name out loud. He’d been summoned to go home because his Mother had died. No one went home for funerals, but by the Grace of God, he was being sent home.
So, my Father was summoned home at his mother’s death in 1944. He was a gambler and had lost all his money in the dice and card games on the islands, so he had to borrow money. He borrowed one hundred dollars from another soldier in his unit to make is way home from California when he got off the aircraft that flew him back from the Pacific. That was the equivalent of about a month and a half’s wages now. The soldier who loaned him the money stopped at our farm with his family some thirty years later. The man had become a scientist working in the nuclear weapons field. He was still in awe of being repaid that loan he’d made years ago to my father. Money which I’m sure he felt he’d never see again.
One of the men in my father’s platoon had a fortune in gold teeth he had knocked out of dead Japanese soldier’s mouths. My dad said there were dead and bloated Japanese bodies everywhere. In addition to being wonderful Father and raising 11 of his own, I think this is part of the reason he adopted my Korean Brother later in life for what he saw and did over there. Cold people and brutal times.
I hope to be half the man my Father was… but don’t think I’ll make it.
We will see cold and hard times ahead. Just like they lived through.
Prepare… and don’t leave God out of your preparedness inventory.
Jack Lawson
Associate Member, Sully H. deFontaine Special Forces Association Chapter 51, Las Vegas, Nevada
Author of “The Slaver’s Wheel”, “A Failure of Civility,” “And We Hide From The Devil,” “Civil Defense Manual” and “In Defense.”
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. Those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain.” – Rutger Hauer in his “Time to die” scene from the movie “Blade Runner”
In my memories are the above in a figurative sense… the below in the literal reality of my past…
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. The darkness of Zambia I parachuted into at two o’clock in the morning with 60 pounds of explosives in my drop pack. I’ve watched a frightened, but still majestic and graceful family of giraffes gallop the African bush as I hung out the door of a helicopter flying by them at treetop level, almost close enough to touch them. Battled it out with terrorists mano a mano while neck deep in crocodile infested idle waters on the banks and sandbars of the Honde and Limpopo Rivers in Mozambique”
From Jack Lawson… an American in 1RLI Support Commando and attached to Rhodesian “C Squadron” SAS Africa 1977-79
Reading Stan’s and Jack’s stories of their fathers reminds me how important men, real mean, are to their family and their country. You and others with similar dads are blessed, and their lives and stories bless us all.
Jack-thank you so much for sharing your story if your dad with me an everyone else-I wrote my article today from memory of reading my dad’s memoir of the war (which I have somewhere in a box/bin since we moved a year or so ago into ‘Green Acres’)..I think that you and NCScout are carrying on the tradition of great American men to help lead the people out of darkness….