Hitler in the Crosshairs

Collin Hansen:

The reading public loves war stories. This is no new development. Consider The History of the Pelopennesian War, written by the Athenian general Thucydides in 431 B.C. Wars change the course of entire civilizations. They are a matter of life and death, and not only for the soldiers who fight in them. No wonder they capture our interest and imagination.

War stories also give us heroes and villains. We name schools, streets, and cities after the heroes. We dance in the streets upon the death of the villains. We curse them for decades, even centuries, after they wreaked destruction upon our friends, family, and other loved ones. War is personal.

John Woodbridge was only a child during World War II, growing up in the home of a Presbyterian pastor in Savannah, Georgia. He did no fighting, but the war was personal for him. He knew one of its heroes—Ira “Teen” Palm, an Army officer who helped lead the American push into Munich at the end of the war. And by the strange, sovereign work of God, his minister dad became the owner of a coveted artifact from the war’s greatest villain. Woodbridge, research professor of church history at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, tells this fascinating story in Hitler in the Crosshairs: A GI’s Story of Courage of Faith, co-written with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Maurice Possley.

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