Whatever It Takes

The Amazing Adventures of God's Work Around the World

Dub Jackson

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780805426885
• eBook ISBN: 9781433676901
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

"The prevailing philosophy of foreign missions was to send career missionaries to the nations of the world and let the fellow believers at home support them with their monies and prayers…Then Dub Jackson emerged on the scene…God planted a dream in his heart about reaching thousands…with the gospel of Jesus Christ…This book is about that watershed vision…This is a book about miracles and divine provision…This story must be told…"This book is not a dull history of some business plan and its processes. This book is about the incredible moving of God in the lives of real people, just like you and me. It is about the sacrifice that has brought now hundreds of thousands of people on Partnership Missions and millions into the Kingdom of God through their witness. This book throbs with life and whets the appetite for more. Every born-again Christian ought to read this book. It tells the story that is the closest to the heart of God, the story of redeeming love, compelling sacrifice, and glorious Good News."—from the foreword

Chapter 1

HIS WINGS OVER MY WINGS

In primary flight training

WORLD WAR II WAS RAGING throughout the South Pacific the day I drove my Jeep toward a little airstrip deep in the hot, steamy jungles of Nadzab, New Guinea. That was to be a day of serious preparation for reentering combat as a fighter pilot. It was also going to be the first of many days the Lord would use to prepare and preserve me for the work He had planned. The Nadzab airstrip had been laid out along the Markham Valley between the mountains of the Owen Stanley Range, where all pilots and combat crews took familiarization flights before going into combat.

Nadzab was secure, but most of the island was still held by the Japanese, and our daily missions consisted of dive-bombing and strafing targets in and around Wewak and Rabul. Other planes involved in these missions were the B–24 and B–25 bombers, together with P–47 and P–51 fighters. Of course I was overjoyed as my Jeep pulled up in front of the choice of almost every young pilot I knew, the world-famous Lockheed P–38, the fastest fighter in the world!

My heart beat with anticipation that morning as I approached the primitive hut we called the Operations Center. Fifth Air Force Fighter Command in the Philippines had just assigned me to fly P–38s with the Forty-ninth Fighter Group! It was a dream come true! After years of longing to fly America’s number one fighter plane, today I would make my solo flight in the P–38!

There were no P–38 instructors at this advanced combat staging area, so we were given tech orders for the plane and told to study them until we were ready to fly. My good friend Bill Hamilton was also transferring to fighters and joined with me as we took the tech manuals and studied them all morning. By one o’clock we felt ready to give it a try, so we drove back to the strip and declared to the major that we were ready to go. He pointed to two beautiful P–38s parked in front of Operations and said, “Take ’em up, and from here on you are on your own!” That was our formal training for combat flying in the P–38.

I started the two powerful Allison engines and taxied onto the runway, pushed the throttles forward, and held the brakes until the plane vibrated into full power. When I released the brakes, the plane shot down the runway and up into the New Guinea sky. I was weeping for joy as I looked out and saw those beautiful blue-and-white Air Force markings on the wing and realized my dream had come true. This had to be one of the greatest days of my life as a pilot, for nothing had been more important to me than serving my country and flying that P–38.

In the cockpit of my P–38 before a combat missionPhilippines, 1945

A fighter was unlike any of the planes I had flown before. In a fighter you could roll, dive, and loop as you pleased, while as a bomber pilot, it was just straight and level! This was real flying! The plane was easy to handle, and I flew about seventy-five miles over the jungles and the tall kuni grass and began practicing peel-ups in order to be ready to make a real fighter approach when I came back to Nadzab for my first landing. While flying back to Nadzab to land, I dipped down just above the grass, and at 350 MPH, I was impressed to pray, “Lord, when this war is over, and if You spare me to return home, should I do something that would dishonor Your name, I would rather You just cut one of these engines now!” Although that was not the kind of prayer the Lord wanted to hear, I held my breath, for I really meant it! When the field came into view, I crossed the end of the runway, still at 350 mph, and chopped the throttles, pulling up into a climbing 360-degree turn to kill off speed and put down my wheels and flaps. Twenty seconds later, after an approach that was almost a loop, I touched down in what would always be my favorite airplane, the P–38. I was thrilled speechless. I had just flown America’s number one fighter!

A Never-to-Be-Forgotten Emergency!

One week later on March 15, 1945, a day I will remember forever, God in His great mercy preserved me in spite of my inexperience and mistakes in flying. On that day I had gone to the Operations Center to check out my plane for additional transition in preparation for combat. I needed to cram in as much flight training as possible in order to be ready to join the fighter group that had invited me to fly with them. It was another beautiful morning, and I can still see my plane poised and ready for flight. The sergeant informed me that my plane had been outfitted for combat, and the four fifty-caliber machine guns and the twenty-millimeter canon were fully armed. As I climbed up on the wing to get into the cockpit, I also saw two five-hundred-pound bombs hanging under the wing. Since the combat mission had been cancelled, the sergeant told me to jettison the bombs in the river after takeoff. His last remarks were, “Oh, by the way, pay no attention to that left fuel gauge—it doesn’t work.”

I would soon discover that this flight would be one of the most exciting and nerve-racking of my short life! The takeoff was routine, and as I soared higher and higher through the light, fluffy clouds that usually turned into rain in the afternoon, the peaks of the Owen Stanley Range came quickly into focus. Today I planned to practice flying with one engine dead. I shut down the right engine and began flying on the left one, with one propeller feathered. I had been practicing single-engine procedures for about forty-five minutes when a string of P–47s and P–51s cut in front of me and pulled up into what we called a “rat race” or a game like follow-the-leader. I decided to get in on the fun so restarted the dead engine and pulled hard on the controls to join in with them. Suddenly my plane made a violent roll to the left. I thought that sudden maneuver had been caused by one of the combat flaps failing to come down. Since the plane had flown smoothly on one engine with one prop feathered, I just did not associate this problem with a dead engine. However, I knew I was in big trouble!

I was too far from my home field to return, so I pulled the nose up to climb over the mountains and to attempt an emergency landing on the other side at Lae, New Guinea, an Australian field. As I struggled to maintain control of the plane, I remembered that Lae was the last airfield from which the famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart had flown before disappearing during her attempt to fly around the world.

With my P–38 Lockheed Lightning

As I climbed over the mountains, losing valuable air speed and almost losing directional control, I called the tower at Lae and informed them that I was coming in for an emergency landing. The Australian controller cleared me to land but instructed me to approach the field from the ocean toward the mountains.

I radioed back that because of the emergency, I would have to land the best way I could. Normally I would approach the landing strip at about 110 mph and touch down at eighty-five or ninety. But because of my emergency, I found that I had to fly at 165 mph to maintain directional control! I was losing airspeed all along as I climbed to clear the tops of the mountains, and just before the plane would have stalled and rolled over into the ground, I topped the mountain and quickly pushed the nose down to pick up airspeed and regain control. At this point I could see the Lae field clearly and understood immediately why the tower had instructed me to approach the field from the ocean! From a mountain approach, I would have to pull up to clear an electric power line and be forced to land further down the already-too-short runway, thus giving up some valuable runway that I would need in order to stop the plane before crashing into the ocean.

After clearing the power lines, I decided to push the nose down and force the plane onto the muddy field with my brakes locked. I figured that would cause my nose gear to collapse, and help me stop before going into the ocean. When I hit the ground, the plane slid sideways at a high speed, then leaped back into the air. I pushed it back on the wet ground again, with the brakes still locked, dirt and mud flying everywhere.

My priority shifted quickly from trying to save the plane to surviving without going into the ocean! Having been raised in west Texas, where water was always scarce, I didn’t know how to swim and was determined to stop the plane before it hit the water.

The plane began to skid and swerve toward the tower as I tried to hold it straight, and when I reached the end of the runway with mud and dirt still flying, I released one brake and let the plane spin around until it stopped just short of the ocean. The Australians in the tower later told me that when the plane veered toward them they were about ready to bail out of the tower and run for safety.

When the propeller on the dead engine stopped turning, I realized what had happened—the tank with the inoperative fuel gauge had run out of gas! Flying with one dead engine and a prop that had not been feathered had forced me to fly at a high rate of speed in order to keep control.

That day, flying over the jungles of New Guinea, I broke every rule of self-preservation in landing the plane with one engine out. But God had preserved me anyway!

I sat in the cockpit, as the dust settled, and thanked the Lord for His care. I was still sitting there when the Australians drove up in their Jeep. I climbed down out of the plane and immediately realized just how much care God had given. Under the wings were the bombs I had forgotten to jettison! Had I been successful in collapsing the gear, the plane would have been blown to bits! That was an amazing and miraculous rescue from disaster. God was there.

God Takes Care Again!

On a night bombing mission from Clark Field in the Philippines to the Japanese-held Ten Ho airfield in Canton, China, we were to be faced with another urgent need for God’s care as the searchlights and antiaircraft guns zeroed in on us, and Japanese fighters followed us from the target.

At that time I was assigned to a squadron of B–24s of the Forty-third Bomb Group, of the Fifth Air Force. Our missions were usually designed to find and bomb enemy ships. We always flew at night and at low altitude. One evening we took off from Clark Field just at dusk, flying low and through the night, headed for our first checkpoint, Hong Kong. As we approached this Japanese-held city, our plane set off alarms, and the Japanese began turning off all their lights. By the time we were over the city, all was dark!

By radar we picked up the Pearl River out of Hong Kong and flew toward the target at four thousand feet altitude. The Japanese soon spotted us, and their searchlights were so bright I could have read a newspaper in the cockpit. We took our propellers out of synchronization and began to fly in an evasive pattern, trying to get away from their lights and guns. The crew members threw out the radar window, which is a tinfoil type material designed to throw off track radar-controlled lights and antiaircraft guns. Nothing seemed to help. We were firmly fixed in their lights!

As a last resort, we tried an old trick that had been successful before. The waist gunners began throwing out empty beer bottles they had brought along for that purpose. The whistle of these empty bottles made so much noise the Japanese below assumed we were dropping bombs and turned off their lights.

We continued up the river to our initial checkpoint, turned right, and proceeded to methodically and repeatedly bomb Ten Ho airfield. On the last run over the airdrome, we dropped a string of bombs right down the runway, then turned for home.

Just out of Hong Kong, the tail gunner called and said that we had Japanese night fighters crisscrossing our tail. However, as they prepared to attack, we flew into some thick clouds that I have to believe God prepared for us, and we were able to return safely to our base in the Philippines.

I never cease to give thanks to God for His constant care. Clearly on this flight and every flight in World War II, I firmly believe that He preserved my life for the missionary service He later called us to. I could not have imagined all of the spiritual joys, battles, and victories He was going to give to us in our missionary service and witness to the Japanese who were so aggressively seeking to destroy us!

Through the above illustrations of God’s care and leading and through other numerous and continued instances of His care, God directed us into the most joyous and victorious life one could have ever dreamed of! Thank God for His plan and purpose for our lives.

Chapter 2

WORLD WAR II ENDS— SPIRITUAL CHALLENGES MULTIPLY

EVENTUALLY THE JAPANESE IMPERIAL ARMY was defeated, and General Douglas MacArthur accepted J...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Conclusion
• About the Author