Editor’s note: I recently received an email from my friend, Bob Alexander, affectionately dubbed “Mr. A.” There was a link to a YouTube video of the 1930’s premier of “God Bless America.” I so appreciated his remarks that I wanted to share them, as well as his photograph. Happy Memorial Day!
Since I was a small child, I have loved this Country and its Flag. I am now 85 and feel even stronger about it as I see the external and internal strife our precious country is going through.
My parents, like yours, were great admirers of the Founding Fathers and all the struggles they went through to write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. That includes bad treatment up to death, in many cases.
For eight years, in the 1940s and 1950s, I was in Training and Service in the Fleet as a Naval Aviator.
During this process, I was on six aircraft carriers in a large part of the world, with 229 carrier landings—22 of which were made at night.
My standard method of operation was to pray to God on the downwind leg, that He would guide me to a safe landing. He never failed me.
ALL of the Naval Aviators I ever knew had similar attitudes and I once heard one say, “We would follow our flight leader into hell to protect this country.”
You are younger, and we have seen our country’s attitudes degenerate into much less responsible and far less patriotic ones.
American singer Kate Smith saw a similar deterioration right before WWII. Much of that came about as a result of the Great Depression. She went to Irving Berlin, the great songwriter, and asked him to write a song which would elevate the peoples’ attitude and spirit.
His answer was that he already had it written. My feeling is that God had His Hand in this and made it available. The rest is history. It was such a beautiful song and Kate Smith was the perfect patriotic person with the huge voice to sing “God Bless America.”
It became one of the strongest, uplifting forces which tremendously aided our forces to take on and defeat Satan’s hordes in WWII.
It is time for us, again, to heed God’s Word in 2 Chronicles 7:14, and call upon God to “Heal our land” and once again be the “Shining City on a Hill.”
Robert (Bob) Alexander
