In the Second World War from June 1944 to June 1945, the United States suffered about one million casualties out of the 1.25 million total of the entire war. Germany had surrendered on May 7, but Japan fought on, seemingly to extinction. The American Joint Chiefs and their leader George Marshall struggled to find a means to force the Japanese to quit. The conflict that began April 1 on Okinawa—an island considered part of Japan by the emperor—was using up American troops at an unprecedented rate, and the Japanese were fighting to the last cartridge, making suicide attacks or just killing themselves in their caves.

In the first six months of 1945, General Curtis LeMay sent B-29 bombers to destroy the industrial centers of Japan, culminating in the fire-bombing of Tokyo in March, which wiped out sixteen square miles of the city, killing more than 100,000 people, mostly civilians. By mid-June the six largest cities of Japan had been fire-bombed to ashes, causing the Japanese government to redouble its production efforts and recruit a citizen army of several million people to repel any invasion.

At the end of 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt had authorized the Manhattan Project, the development of a bomb that could use the power of nuclear fission as a weapon of mass destruction. Led by theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the top secret project scientists raced to create a usable weapon before the Germans or Japanese developed their own nuclear program. Within two years the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico produced two bombs.

A special air command called the 509th Composite Group, commanded by Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. surreptitiously joined the more than 130,000 people working on the project, and prepared to deliver the atomic weapons over Germany or Japan. Germany surrendered before the atomic bombs could be used there, but Japan stubbornly refused to admit defeat as they prepared for an invasion of the homeland. In July, 1945, the weapon was successfully tested near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the stage was set for the use of a weapon that could change history.

The “targeting committee” chose five potential sites in Japan that had military significance but had not yet been badly attacked. At the Potsdam meeting of “the Big Three,” Truman once again reiterated the American requirement of the “unconditional surrender“ of Japan and warned of a new destruction about to descend on them if they did not come to terms. The Japanese insisted on keeping their emperor. After much debate and soul-searching, the President gave the order to deploy the first atomic bomb.

On August 6, Paul Tibbets in command of the B-29 Enola Gay, named after his mother, lifted off for the six-hour flight from Tinian Island to the City of Hiroshima, Japan. At 31,000 feet, the bomb, named “Little Boy,” was released and detonated at about 1,900 feet above the city. About 80,000 people were killed by the blast and the ensuing firestorm. Another 70,000 were injured, and many died in the following days. Ground zero was about a one-mile radius, and 4.4-mile burn zone. Warfare, foreign policy, and history were changed forever.

At the age of nine, William Wilberforce began his formal schooling, falling under the influence of a godly teacher, then his aunt and uncle to whom he was sent upon the death of his father in 1767. His Methodist relatives were supporters of evangelist George Whitefield; Wilberforce became attracted to “evangelical religion.” At the age of twelve, however, William’s grandfather and mother, disturbed at his “nonconformity” brought him home to be placed under the influence of rigid Anglicanism. By the age of seventeen, Wilberforce had abandoned his attachment to evangelicalism, inherited a fortune from his grandfather, and entered Cambridge as a witty, party-loving, hail-fellow-well-met student. He excelled in his studies though rather lazy and hedonistic, earning two degrees.

While a twenty-one-year-old college student, Wilberforce, along with his friend William Pitt, became a Member of Parliament as an independent. He continued his life as a bon-vivant, welcomed at all the best parlors and gambling dens. Although his eyesight was bad and his stature thin and small, his shrewd mind and powerful and eloquent voice won him many admirers. In 1784, on a European vacation, his life changed forever when he came to faith in Christ and submitted his life to the pursuit of godliness.

Because outspoken Christian views and evangelistic zeal were frowned on by the upper classes as boring and socially unacceptable, Wilberforce considered leaving politics altogether. He sought counsel from his pastoral friend John Newton and his old friend William Pitt (“the Younger”), both of whom strongly urged him to remain in Parliament and serve Christ in the highest councils of the land. He chose to remain in public life and champion biblical morality whatever the cost socially. In 1787 Wilberforce began what eventually became a crusade to end the slave trade.

Wilberforce joined with Quakers and other fellow Anglicans in a campaign to inform the public about the horrors of the slave trade. His leadership of a remarkable fraternity, unique in British history, led to the formation of chapters of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade all over Britain. They garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures for legislation relating to the abolition of the slave trade, and they coordinated their activities with like-minded groups in the other slave-shipping countries of Europe and the United States. Wilberforce commenced his anti-slave trade campaign in Parliament, in earnest, in 1789. In the 1790s, the French Revolution and the slave revolt in Haiti set back the forces of the anti-slave trade in England. The bills brought forth by Wilberforce were defeated again and again, and he was even accused of sympathies to the French. Undaunted, Wilberforce and his allies, now called the Clapham Sect, continued to meet, strategize and inform people, despite the criticism and success of their opponents. The parliamentary agreement to abolish the trade “gradually over time” and the War with France that broke out in 1795, slowed the cause for more than ten years.

The final phase of the campaign included a 400-page book by Wilberforce, and the building of a political coalition that finally ended in the abolition of the slave trade, with royal assent, in 1807, one year before the American Congress did the same. From 1812 to 1824, Wilberforce’s health deteriorated badly, but he kept up his proposals, now to end slavery altogether in the British Empire. The government was opposed to abolition of slavery itself, for it generated great wealth, especially for the vested interests of the aristocracy in the House of Lords. In his 60s, Wilberforce became the figurehead of abolitionism, having to leave Parliament with broken health. As he lay dying of the flu in 1833, he was informed that the government had finally agreed to the compromise that led to the full abolition of slavery in a bill the following year. William Wilberforce died knowing that his unique place in Christ’s Kingdom and the life-long efforts at moral reform—especially the ending of slavery in the Empire—had not been in vain.

Day was born during Henry VIII’s reign and joined the printing profession during the few years of young King Edward VI’s reign. His family origins are obscure, but his long career in printing took place in London. He likely began as an apprentice in the printing business before setting up his own presses, along with partner William Seres around 1546. Day and Seres specialized in religious books that were controversial, and received several valuable patents like Ponet’s Catechism, for popular Protestant titles. The Reformation was still in its formative years in England and there was an insatiable demand for godly literature. In the early days of their press, fully one-half of their published books attacked the superstitious doctrine of transubstantiation. They also published Continental Reformers in English. In 1549, Day and Seres amicably separated and John started his own printing presses, and joined the prestigious Stationer’s Company, a London printing guild. In 1551 he came out with a beautiful Bible, the book most in demand. His willingness to publish foreign authors, brought skilled Dutch printers to his door, men with whom he worked for the rest of his life.

Roman Catholicism was still strong in England although the monasteries had been coopted and destroyed. The Pope had not given up on retrieving the country for the Roman Church, keeping active priests in the homes of Catholic noblemen, preparing for an opportunity to restore the Roman Church and annihilate the leading Protestants. The accession of Mary Tudor to the throne appeared to be the very opportunity to accomplish those purposes.

Devoutly Catholic, “Bloody Mary” burned at the stake for heresy some of the best-selling authors of Day and Seres; others fled to the continent, as did most printers. There is some evidence that Day remained in England and published under a pseudonym, keeping Protestant literature alive during the Marian reign. He seems to have published Lady Jane Gray and John Hooper, both martyred for their faith. Day was eventually sent to the Tower of London for “printing naughty books.” Toward the end of Mary’s reign, he was released, and worked part time with a Catholic printer, biding his time till Mary was gone.

John Hooper (c. 1495-1555)

When Elizabeth became Queen, Day was back in business printing Reformation literature, including all the sermons of the martyr Hugh Latimer, Protestant catechisms, and various works of Continental theologians, and some scientific works. The high quality of his paper, woodcuts and binding earned him a royal patent to print a particular work “for life,” securing his reputation as a master-printer. He also published Psalters, so vital to worship in all the Protestant Churches and homes, and Bible portions, affordable for the poor.

John Day’s crowning achievement, the one that secured his place in history, was the one he undertook in 1563—John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. That international best-seller enabled Day to move to even larger quarters. He invested his own money in the project, and also interviewed men who had been persecuted or had known the martyrs, as he himself had. The second edition in 1570 ran to 2,300 pages in two folio volumes. William Cecil, the Queen’s main counsellor ordered every cathedral to own a copy. Collectors’ prices of the Second Edition today start at $15,000.

No doubt John Day’s publishing success helped him in practical ways. His first wife bore him 13 children, as did his second wife. Puritans took the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply most seriously. Day seems to have had both a sense of humor (who would not with 26 children?) and a sense of the importance of the Reformation, for his printer’s device shows a rising sun and the words “Arise, For It Is Day!” The number of spiritual children that resulted from his publishing efforts, is known only to God. John Day died on July 23, 1584, probably around the age of sixty-two.

sar Nicholas II was the last emperor of “All Russia.” He and his family were arrested during the Bolshevik Revolution which engulfed Russia in 1917. Nicholas and the German Kaiser, Wilhelm, were first cousins and both had tried to get the other to back down from going to war in 1914, when Serbia was attacked by Austria. The “Willy-Nicky” letters, however, did not stop the various pre-war national alliances from rolling forward with military action in the Balkans (“the powder keg of Europe”), and snowballing until all of Europe was aflame. Russia was not prepared for the German onslaught that swept into their territory, eventually killing more than a million and a half Russians and capturing more than a million more. The Tsar remained at the front, while his empire disintegrated behind him, with millions of Russians tired of the losses from the war and ready to be led into a totally new kind of political regime. Nicholas finally returned home, too late to stop the revolution.

Nicholas Romanov, born in the Royal Palace in 1868 to Tsar Alexander III, inherited the Russian Empire in 1894 at the age of twenty-six, upon the unexpected death of his father. He was related to many of the royal families of Europe, first cousin to the King of England and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. He married the granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. Together they had five children, the last being Alexei, a hemophiliac and heir apparent.

On the surface, it appeared that, even though Nicholas believed himself God’s representative on earth to rule Russia, and eschewed any thoughts of a constitutional monarchy such as that of his cousins in England, the people of his Empire seemed quiescent enough that his following his father’s policies suited the society well. His foreign policy kept the peace in the Balkans and alliance with France intact, although an ill-advised war with Japan in 1902 proved militarily disastrous, and demonstrated Russia’s real weaknesses.

A revolution broke out in 1905 when various workers’ socialist parties marched, unarmed, on the Winter Palace, to present a petition to the Tsar for labor reform. The marchers were essentially peaceful, singing hymns and carrying pictures of the Tsar. Convinced by his counsellors that the marchers were an absolute threat to his autocratic rule, he left St. Petersburg, and the army fired on the demonstrators, killing many. The state “advisory” legislature the Tsar had called into being, the Duma, demanded universal suffrage, radical land reform, and release of political prisoners. The Tsar dismissed the Duma. Workers’ strikes swept the country. By 1911, the third Duma was chosen and moved more strategically in seeking reforms. Three years later doom descended on Europe.

Siding with Serbia over a controversy with Austria—the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand—Russia went to war with Germany the first week of August, 1914. Although Tsar Nicholas had called for general mobilization, Russia was woefully unprepared to fight a war. Germany had been preparing for more than twenty years for just such a conflict and the ill-advised Tsar sent millions of men to their deaths, some having drilled with broomsticks, and others with no ammunition when sent to battle.

Food and fuel shortages brought mass starvation to the families at home, as Russian armies reeled before the German attacks. The Duma criticized the Tsar’s attempt to bolster the army by going to the front himself. He dissolved the Duma once again, and political moderates seeking reform joined the more radical parties who were calling for the overthrow of the Tsar. In February of 1917, revolution broke out again when industrial workers struck and hungry people marched calling for bread. Soldiers were called out and fighting in the streets erupted. The Duma formed a provisional government and the Tsar abdicated. In October, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party overthrew the provisional liberal “capitalist middle class” Kerensky government, and declared rule by councils of soldiers, peasants, and workers—“soviets.” The Atheistic Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, took over St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd and later Leningrad). Civil war erupted between the “Whites”—a loose coalition of monarchists, capitalists, and social democrats—and the “Reds,”—the radical communists, which included support from most of the army. The war lasted for about five years, with the ultimate triumph of the Bolsheviks and the establishment of the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The Royal family was moved several times by the Bolsheviks, finally to Yekaterinburg. On July 17, 1918, the Tsar and his family, whose ancestors had ruled Russia for centuries, were taken to a basement and massacred by the secret police. In 1979, 1998 and 2007, the bones of the Romanovs were discovered in three separate locations, not far from the site of their assassinations, accounting for the entire family and others who were slaughtered with them. Communism demonstrated for the world to see, not just this once, but over and over and over again, what people can expect from the attempt to establish a socialist utopia, whether in Russia, Cuba, China, Albania, Cambodia, North Korea, etc., in a revolutionary world of depraved sinners who rule without God or His Law.